At the SALT Bermuda Digital Finance Forum 2026, the Premier of Bermuda, the Hon. David Burt, JP, MP, and George Zeng, GM of NEAR AI, announced a partnership between the Government of Bermuda and NEAR AI to deploy secure artificial intelligence across public sector services. The collaboration will focus on applying secure AI to improve government operations and the delivery of citizen-facing services. NEAR AI will provide the inference infrastructure, with models running on NEAR AI Cloud’s confidential computing environment.
Bermuda introduced one of the world’s first comprehensive regulatory frameworks for digital assets in 2018. The NEAR AI partnership extends this record of early adoption from blockchain-based financial services to public sector AI infrastructure. Priority areas include services where automated systems can reduce administrative workload, improve processing times, and increase responsiveness to citizens. The initial prototype gives public servants a secure AI assistant for processing administrative tasks that involve sensitive citizen data. Queries and data are processed inside NEAR AI’s hardware-enforced enclaves, where the host operating system, the GPU operator, and NEAR AI itself are cryptographically locked out.
As government AI systems evolve toward more autonomous workflows, where agents manage credentials, access sensitive records, and execute tasks on behalf of users, the security requirements become more demanding. NEAR AI’s IronClaw, a secure, open-source AI agent runtime, provides the architecture for reliably scaling agentic services. IronClaw isolates credentials in encrypted vaults and sandboxes tools in secure containers, ensuring that sensitive data never reaches the underlying AI model. For government applications that require both autonomy and auditability, this architecture enables deployment without compromising data protection.
“This partnership with NEAR AI puts secure AI in the hands of public servants,” said the Hon. David Burt, JP, MP, Premier of Bermuda. “We chose NEAR AI because their infrastructure protects citizen data at the architectural level. This is what responsible AI adoption looks like, and we intend to explore NEAR AI’s robust capabilities across our public sector infrastructure.”
“In working with NEAR AI, Bermuda is setting the proper standard for governments’ use of AI for handling citizens’ data,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR and CEO of NEAR AI. “When a public servant submits their personal data to an AI system, even the infrastructure provider should not be able to see that data. Confidentiality should be built into the very architecture of AI systems that handle sensitive information.”