The question is who owns it.
The world is waking up to the need for user-owned AI. But user-owned AI means much more than open-source models or self-hosting.
It means users retain ownership, control, and economic participation as AI becomes the primary interface to the internet. In a world where agents work, earn, spend, negotiate, invest, and create value on behalf of billions of people, users need guarantees:
- Privacy: your data belongs to you
- Verifiability: you can prove what ran, on what data, and with what model
- Neutrality: everyone has equal access and markets are open
- Alignment: AI acts in your interests
User-owned AI requires a complete stack.
The next internet won’t be navigated primarily by humans. It will be navigated by agents acting on behalf of humans.
Every search, purchase, investment, booking, workflow, and business process will increasingly be delegated. The infrastructure governing those interactions will determine who captures the value they create.
Long before AI became mainstream, NEAR recognized that an agent-driven economy would require scalable execution, user-owned accounts, privacy, verifiable computation, and neutral coordination layers. The last decade has been spent building those foundations.
Today, those foundations are beginning to power real-world systems.
NEAR AI’s private inference powers Venice’s privacy-preserving AI platform, serving more than 3 million registered users. Major fintech platforms like Abound and the Government of Bermuda are integrating NEAR AI for applications where protecting sensitive financial and citizen data is critical. NEAR AI Cloud now provides anonymization and TEE-secured confidential inference across more than 30 models spanning both frontier and open-source AI.
But this is only the beginning.
The privacy renaissance emerging across crypto is the opening act of a much larger shift. Users increasingly expect ownership over their assets. Soon they will demand ownership over their data. Then ownership over their agents. And ultimately ownership over the value those agents create. Agents won’t simply streamline existing economic activity. They will create entirely new forms of value. They will discover opportunities. Coordinate work. Allocate capital. Negotiate services. Build businesses. And participate in markets on behalf of users.
The defining question of the next decade isn’t whether AI creates value. It’s who owns the systems that distribute it.
A future where a handful of companies own the models, interfaces, decisions, and economic flows of billions of people is one possible outcome.
Or:
A future where users own their data, their assets, their intelligence, and the value generated on their behalf is another.
NEAR is building for the second future.
