You can if the manufacturer has a track record that refutes the notion, and especially if they have verifiable hardware matching publicly disclosed circuit designs. But this is Intel, with their track record, I wouldn't trust it even if the schematics were public. Intel ME not being disable-able by consumers, while being entirely omitted for certain classes of government buyers tells me everything I need to know.

> That's my point, this sounds like a way to create a backdoor for at-rest data.

I get the feeling honestly it seems more expensive and more effort to backdoor it..

By design, you don't trust it. You never hand out the keys so there's no secret to back door. The task is never unencrypted, at rest or otherwise.

Well yeah... You do the initial encryption yourself by whatever means you trust

There is no hardware encryption or decryption.

I encrypt some data and keep the key. I send the encrypted data to you (probably some cloud provider). I tell you to do some operations on the data. I don't tell you the key or what the data is or what the operations mean. You send the results back to me. I use the key to decrypt them.

You have helped me with my compute task, but the data you have is totally meaningless without the key, and only I have the key.

It's hard to believe that it's possible to make encryption where this can do useful work, but it is.