WASHINGTON, July 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarifai, a global leader in AI and pioneer of the full-stack AI platform, today announced the launch of AI Runners, a groundbreaking new offering designed to provide developers and MLOps engineers with uniquely flexible options for deploying and managing their AI models. AI Runners enables users to connect models running on their local machines or private servers directly to Clarifai's robust and scalable platform via a seamless, publicly accessible API, offering a "best of both worlds" solution for modern AI development.

The rise of agentic AI, capable of "thinking for themselves," setting goals, using tools with protocols like MCP, and solving complex problems, is driving an unprecedented demand for computing power. AI Runners directly address this challenge by providing a cost-effective and secure solution for managing the escalating demands of modern AI workloads.

"Agentic AI is driving significant compute demands, and AI Runners provide a practical, secure solution for every developer. It's essentially ngrok for AI models, letting you build on your current setup and keep your models exactly where you want them, yet still get all the power and robustness of Clarifai's API for your biggest agentic AI ideas," said Alfredo Ramos, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Clarifai. "Our goal is to make advanced AI development – from your first line of code to a deployed application – genuinely easier and more budget-friendly for creators everywhere."

AI Runners offer distinct advantages for developers and enterprises:

• Unmatched Flexibility & Control: Clarifai is the only platform currently offering developers their models or MCP tools anywhere – on a local development machine, an on-premises server, or a private cloud cluster – and connect them to the Clarifai API without complex networking. This allows users to keep sensitive data and custom models within their own environment and leverage existing compute infrastructure without vendor lock-in.
• Supercharge Your Models with a World-Class Platform: AI Runners allow instant serving of custom models through Clarifai's scalable, publicly accessible API, enabling integration into any application. Users can build complex multi-step AI workflows by chaining local models with thousands of models available on the Clarifai platform, all managed and monitored from a unified dashboard.
• A Streamlined and Economical Path to Production: Simplify the development workflow, making powerful AI development accessible and cost-effective by starting locally, and then scaling seamlessly to production in Kubernetes-based compute clusters on Clarifai. With a straightforward onboarding process and transparent pricing, allowing users to start small and scale their operations as needed. Customers can save even further by leveraging Clarifai's Compute Orchestration in multiple clouds and on-premise Kubernetes clusters, which enables traffic-based autoscale to/from zero, batching of requests, spot instances, and GPU fractioning so you can run more AI workloads on the same hardware.

Pricing & Availability:
Clarifai is introducing a new Developer Plan at a promotional price of $1 per month for the first year (standard price: $10 per month). This plan empowers developers to utilize AI Runners and provides access to hundreds of the latest AI models available on the Clarifai platform to create sophisticated AI workloads.
Clarifai AI Runners are available now. For more information and to get started, visit the Clarifai website.

About Clarifai
Clarifai is a global leader in AI and the pioneer of the full-stack AI platform that helps organizations, teams, and developers build, deploy, and operationalize AI at scale. Clarifai's cutting-edge AI platform supports today's modern AI technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Vision Models (LVMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), automated data labeling, high-volume production inference, and more. Founded in 2013, Clarifai is available in cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments and has been used to build more than 1.5 million AI models with more than 400,000 users in 170 countries. Learn more at www.clarifai.com.

For more information or media requests, contact: pr@clarifai.com.