Illia Polosukhin, Alex & Anton: User-Owned AI Is The Next Trillion Dollar Shift (Full Interview)

Illia Polosukhin, Alex and Anton say the future of AI and finance is confidential and user-owned, and they think NEAR is set to lead it. In this conversation, the NEAR team explains why privacy has become a business requirement, and why open-weight models are quickly gaining ground. They also cover how NEAR hosts third-party models confidentially, and why AI agents need NEAR for reputation and civil resistance. Along the way they discuss quantum readiness, how Google built a manipulation engine, and what it takes to build a full agent economy.

Illia Polosukhin is the co-founder of NEAR. Alex and Anton are part of the core NEAR team.

The agentic future is being built right now.