Confidential Inference and Trusted Execution Environments

Anthropic is developing and researching Confidential Inference techniques to ensure user data and model weights are cryptographically guaranteed to be secure. This involves using trusted virtual machines and confidential computing to process encrypted data only within verifiable, trustworthy servers. The system aims to protect against threats to model weights and ensure user data privacy by keeping sensitive information encrypted except during processing in highly restricted environments. The approach involves a trusted loader program within a confidential computing environment that decrypts data, invokes accelerators, and returns encrypted results, with attestation via TPMs to verify code integrity and configuration.