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The upgrade lets users verify confidential AI workloads through Intel Trust Authority instead of parsing raw cryptographic quotes themselves
NEAR AI Cloud now issues Intel-signed attestation tokens for confidential inference requests, adding an independent verification layer backed by Intel Trust Authority. The practical upshot: users running AI workloads in secure enclaves can now get a standardized trust signal without needing to manually dissect raw cryptographic evidence.
What the attestation token actually does #
NEAR AI Cloud originally launched on December 3, 2025, offering cryptographic attestations from Intel and NVIDIA for AI inference running inside Intel TDX (Trust Domain Extensions) CPU enclaves. That setup already provided hardware-rooted security, but verifying it required users to perform deep cryptographic analysis of raw quotes.
The new Intel-signed attestation token changes that dynamic. Intel Trust Authority, a free zero-trust attestation service, now independently verifies the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) evidence and issues a JWT-style token. JWT, or JSON Web Token, is a widely used standard for securely transmitting information between parties.
For confidential inference requests, the flow works like this: data gets encrypted, and decryption keys are withheld until the attestation token confirms the computing environment is genuine and uncompromised. Only after Intel Trust Authority signs off does the workload proceed. That means users no longer need to trust NEAR’s self-reported attestations alone. They get a third-party stamp from one of the world’s largest chipmakers. The system combines Intel TDX on the CPU side with NVIDIA Confidential Computing on the GPU side, covering both halves of the hardware stack where AI inference actually happens.
A broader industry pattern #
Phala implemented similar attestation workflows in March 2026, and SCRT Labs launched SecretVM in May 2026 with comparable TEE verification capabilities. Intel Trust Authority sits at the center of several of these implementations. As a free SaaS offering, it lowers the barrier for any project wanting to add independent verification without building proprietary attestation infrastructure from scratch.
What this means for the NEAR ecosystem #
For developers and enterprises that need confidential computing but don’t want to build and maintain their own attestation verification pipelines, a JWT token from Intel Trust Authority can be checked programmatically using standard libraries in virtually any programming language. That makes policy-based access control, where systems automatically grant or deny access based on attestation results, significantly simpler to implement. NEAR’s differentiation lies in combining this capability with blockchain-native properties: on-chain verification, decentralized orchestration, and token-economic incentives for node operators maintaining secure environments.
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