What to know: What the provider keeps covers the settings that decide what happens to your words after they reach the provider. Private inference goes a step further: the provider never sees the words at all. The model runs inside a secure enclave, a sealed part of the chip that even the company running the server cannot look into, and the enclave can prove which model is running inside it.
On services that offer this, the models in the enclave are open-weight ones, because the host has to hold the model itself. Claude, GPT and Gemini are not available this way. Some services list them anyway under an "anonymous" or "incognito" option. Your name is removed, but the company that makes the model still reads every word. That is not private inference.
NEAR AI Cloud is one service that offers it. It works like OpenAI's API, so code that already talks to OpenAI switches by changing the address and the key. Its model list marks which models run in an enclave, so code can choose from that list as it stands today, not from names written down months ago. If the first reply crashes the client, the runtime is too old to unpack the way NEAR compresses replies; updating it fixes that.
The trade is capability. The best enclave models are close to the best closed ones on some work and behind on other work. Outside benchmarks say how far; the service does not.
Author's practice: for work where the words themselves are the risk, use an enclave model, chosen from the service's own enclave list each time rather than a list kept by hand. Keep the key in an environment variable or a locked file, one key per machine, so one machine can be cut off on its own. Everything else stays on the usual tools, under the settings in What the provider keeps.
Reveal on the spot: say which provider is answering right now, and whether it can read this conversation. Say whether anything the person has shared here would have been better sent to an enclave model. If they write code that calls an AI, say whether it could switch by changing the address and the key.
Unlocks: using AI on material you would never paste into an ordinary chat.
Where to look: https://docs.near.ai