The blockchain-native AI platform now offers Anthropic's latest model with a million-token context window, staking-funded inference credits, and a 7x performance leap over its predecessor
NEAR AI Cloud has added Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5 to its model lineup, giving developers access to one of the most capable coding models on the market through a blockchain-native inference platform. The model comes with a 1 million token context window, adaptive reasoning enabled by default, and pricing set at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
The performance jump is hard to ignore. Claude Sonnet 5.5 scored 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, a coding evaluation benchmark. Its predecessor, Sonnet 5, managed just 10.3% on the same test.
What NEAR AI Cloud actually offers here #
The integration works through NEAR’s unified gateway at cloud-api.near.ai, supporting both OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-native API formats. If you’ve built anything against OpenAI’s API structure, you can point it at NEAR’s endpoint and access Claude Sonnet 5.5 without rewriting your integration layer.
One important caveat: Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs as an “Incognito” model on NEAR AI Cloud. Unlike other models the platform hosts inside Trusted Execution Environments, this one operates through a proxied connection to Anthropic’s infrastructure rather than running directly within NEAR’s secure enclaves. The privacy guarantees are different, specifically that interactions are non-retentive, but the execution model isn’t the same as NEAR’s TEE-hosted options.
The crypto layer underneath #
NEAR AI Cloud isn’t just a model hosting service with a blockchain logo slapped on it. The platform uses the NEAR token as the payment rail for AI inference. Users can stake NEAR to fund compute credits, which then get burned against API calls.
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NEAR AI Cloud has been expanding its model catalog aggressively. The platform now supports dozens of frontier models through its gateway and recently became a provider on OpenRouter, the model routing service that lets developers compare and switch between AI providers.
The pricing aligns directly with Anthropic’s public rates, so NEAR AI Cloud isn’t competing on cost here. The value proposition is the combination of competitive pricing with blockchain-native features: verifiable inference, privacy-preserving architecture for TEE-hosted models, and token-based payment infrastructure.
Why this matters for AI infrastructure #
The 70.6% Terminal-Bench 4.0 score positions Claude Sonnet 5.5 as a serious tool for autonomous coding agents, the kind of AI systems that can write, test, and deploy code with minimal human oversight. These agents need long context windows to understand codebases, strong reasoning to make architectural decisions, and reliable infrastructure to run continuously.
The competitive landscape is getting crowded. Centralized providers like AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Azure all offer Anthropic models. Decentralized inference networks like Akash and others are trying to undercut on price. NEAR AI Cloud is carving out a middle position: centralized enough to offer reliable performance and standard APIs, decentralized enough to integrate token economics and privacy infrastructure.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our