NEAR AI pauses cloud inference after detecting unauthorized access

The confidential AI provider says customer workloads stayed inside hardware-isolated enclaves and that NEAR Protocol was not affected NEAR AI has hit pause on its cloud inference service after discovering that someone got into its systems without permission. For a company whose entire sales pitch is confidential AI, this is an awkward week. The firm’s response, though, leans heavily on the same technology it has been selling all along. What happened at NEAR AI According to the deep research findings, NEAR AI detected unauthorized access to its internal systems on November 9, 2026. The company suspended NEAR AI Cloud inference operations as a precaution right after spotting the breach. NEAR AI told users that customer prompts and inference workloads kept running inside hardware-isolated Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs. The company specifically pointed to Intel TDX and NVIDIA confidential computing as the technologies doing that isolation. That is the core of NEAR AI’s reassurance. The company says the setup keeps data confidential not only from the cloud provider, but from NEAR AI itself. By November 10, 2026, NEAR AI confirmed that the unauthorized access had been addressed...