AI Inference & TEE

Inference runs inside Intel TDX (Trusted Domain Extensions) hardware, provided by Chutes.ai. A TEE is a physical CPU region isolated from the operating system, hypervisor, and platform operator. Code and data inside a TEE are encrypted at the silicon level — the operator cannot read memory, inspect variables, or intercept outputs. The hardware enforces this cryptographically.

ZDrive uses a tiered fallback chain to maximize availability. If a model is overloaded or returns a 429/503, the worker automatically retries the next model in the chain without any client-side intervention.

Model availability

Tier	Primary	Fallback chain
Paid	User-selected	DeepSeek-V3.1-TEE → DeepSeek-R1-0528-TEE → MiniMax-M2.5-TEE → Qwen3-32B-TEE
Free	Qwen3-32B-TEE	MiniMax-M2.5-TEE

The active model is returned in the X-Zdrive-Model-Used response header on every inference call.

Inference flow

Attestation

Every TEE model has a chute_id that maps to a running enclave on Chutes.ai infrastructure. The attestation endpoint verifies:

1. TDX quote — cryptographic proof the enclave is genuine Intel TDX hardware
2. GPU evidence — proof inference ran on a confidential GPU (NVIDIA Blackwell/Hopper)
3. Model hash — SHA-256 of the TDX quote, serving as a fingerprint of the running binary

Note: Attestation proves the TEE ran the claimed code in isolated hardware. It does not prove the model's output is correct or unbiased — only that the execution environment was tamper-resistant.

Input limits

Tier	Max input chars	Equivalent tokens (approx)
Free	16,000	~4,000
Paid	64,000	~16,000