Confidential Computing in plain English.

Confidential computing protects data in use, not just at rest or in transit. The processor creates a trusted execution environment, an encrypted and attested region of memory that the host operating system, hypervisor, and cloud operator cannot inspect, and the workload runs inside it. For AI this means a model can process your prompt on someone else's server while that someone provably cannot read the prompt, the output, or in some designs the model weights. Nvidia's recent GPUs support confidential modes, and the major clouds offer confidential virtual machines. OpenAI announced a Private Inference preview for autumn 2026 built on this approach, as part of its Private Intelligence enterprise tier. The guarantees rest on hardware attestation, so you verify the enclave's identity before sending data, and on the absence of side-channel attacks, which researchers continue to find and vendors continue to patch. It is the strongest technical answer to "can the AI vendor see my data" short of running the model yourself.