The world is waking up to the need for user-owned AI.  What user-owned really means: -Privacy: all data belongs to you -Verifiability: when work is done on your behalf, you can prove what ran, on what data, with what model -Neutrality: equal access and neutral markets -Alignment: AI is on your side User-owned AI goes far beyond the model layer. It means a completely user-owned stack, from verifiable inference to private money rails to a secure agent harness to transparent governance and economics for the whole system. Layer by layer, NEAR has been building the user-owned AI stack for nearly a decade. It began with Illia’s pioneering work on the Transformer architecture, which underpins all major frontier models today, and the early recognition that the AI economy needed open infrastructure if users were going to have real power of choice.  NEAR made early architectural bets on sharded scalability, an account model, chain abstraction, and privacy that are now the foundation for agents to transact at scale while ensuring user sovereignty.  The demand for user-owned AI is growing. NEAR AI’s private inference powers Venice’s privacy-preserving AI platform, which has grown to over 3M registered users. Major fintech platforms like Abound and the Government of Bermuda are integrating NEAR AI for applications where protecting sensitive user and citizen data is critical. NEAR AI Cloud also now provides anonymization and TEE-secured confidential inference for over 30 models, across major AI providers and open-source models.  The privacy renaissance we’ve been witnessing in DeFi is the opening act of a much larger, global shift toward a user-owned AI economy, where users demand sovereignty over their data, assets, and intelligence.  NEAR is building for that world, one where everyone has maximum leverage through AI, rather than a few companies owning the models and interfaces that own the data and decisions of billions. Not only are we witnessing a macro shift in user expectations, but also a whole new category of value taking shape. Given the proper rails, agents will not only streamline current value channels but create many new ones. The infrastructure that shares that value back with users is the infrastructure users truly own.(NEAR Protocol)