DeFi· ★★★· bullish· September 30, 03:40

NEAR AI Cloud adds Claude Sonnet 5.5 with staking-funded inference

—Claude Sonnet 5.5 is available via cloud-api.near.ai in both OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-native formats
—Pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens
—The model scored 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, up from 10.3% for Sonnet 5
—It runs as an Incognito model via a proxy to Anthropic rather than inside NEAR's TEE enclaves

Why it matters: NEAR deepens the blockchain-AI link, using its token as the payment rail for inference and boosting staking demand.