IOSG says private AI is gaining ground as open models close the gap in cost and accuracy
IOSG argues that demand for private AI is rising across both enterprises and consumers as concerns over intellectual property leakage, data retention, and legal discovery become harder to ignore. The report maps the current privacy stack, from contract-based zero data retention and anonymous proxies to trusted execution environments, end-to-end encryption, fully homomorphic encryption, and local inference. Its main point is that the tradeoff is no longer as simple as privacy versus performance. A central example comes from Bridgewater’s AIA Labs and Thinking Machines. In a June 30 case study, an expert-tuned open model, Qwen3-235B, outperformed frontier models on financial judgment tasks while also delivering much lower inference cost. The model scored 84.7% on an independent test set, above an 80% threshold set by investment professionals. Frontier models averaged about 50% with simple prompts and reached 78.2% with expert prompting. By the report’s framing, the fine-tuned Qwen made 29.8% fewer mistakes than the best frontier baseline and ran at 13.8x lower inference cost. IOSG also says infrastructure for private inference and post-training is starting to mature. Enclave-based services from companies such as Phala, Tinfoil, and NEAR AI are pushing privacy costs down, in some cases to parity with or below plain-text routes. Still, major gaps remain in tool calling, agent workflows, and encrypted search, where privacy guarantees often break once requests leave the model layer.



