NEAR AI

The Mission NEAR AI is shifting the power of artificial intelligence from centralized corporations to individual users. Founded by Illia Polosukhin (co-author of the seminal Transformer paper), the platform combines high-performance blockchain infrastructure with Confidential Computing to create “User-Owned AI.”

Core Pillars

• Privacy & Sovereignty: Use AI without sacrificing your data. Your interactions are encrypted and processed in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), ensuring no one—not even the cloud provider—can see your information.

• Verifiable Intelligence: Every AI response includes a cryptographic proof. You can verify that the model used was the correct one and that it operated exactly as intended without tampering.

• On-Chain Agency: Leveraging Chain Abstraction, NEAR AI agents can own accounts, sign transactions, and execute tasks across any blockchain (Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, etc.), making them truly autonomous financial actors.

Key Products

1. NEAR AI Cloud: A developer platform for deploying private, scalable AI models with hardware-backed security.

2. NEAR Private Chat: A secure interface for interacting with top-tier open-source models (like Llama) with a guarantee of zero data logging.

The “Transformer” Pedigree: Because NEAR AI’s leadership literally co-invented the technology behind modern LLMs, the project is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and decentralized web infrastructure.

The Bottom Line: NEAR AI ensures that in the “Agentic Future,” the intelligence serves the user, not the corporation.

Updated: January 5, 2026