Leo—Brave’s AI browser assistant that preserves users’ privacy—is now available to desktop users

Brave is also introducing Leo Premium, a paid plan featuring Anthropic’s Claude Instant with faster response times

Three months ago, Brave previewed Leo—the browser-native AI assistant—on its Nightly channel for developers and testers. Since then we’ve seen great adoption, with tens of thousands of users globally. With user feedback, we’ve been able to improve much faster than we’d hoped—on response-times, the quality of responses, even the product UI. Today, we’re excited to announce that Brave Leo is ready for all Brave users, available in desktop release 1.60.

With that testing, we also received requests for new features. The most common one has been to add different AI language models in Leo. To that end, we’re bringing our users advanced conversational AI experiences through Brave Leo Premium—our new paid option featuring Claude Instant, Anthropic’s state-of-the-art AI assistant.

What is Brave Leo?

Leo, Brave’s browser AI assistant, can help with all sorts of tasks. It can create real-time summaries of webpages or videos. It can answer questions about content, or generate new content. It can even translate pages, analyze them, rewrite them, and more. Whether you’re looking for information, trying to solve a problem, or creating content, Leo can help.

Leo combines this easy, free access to AI with the privacy focus of Brave. Chats with Leo are private, anonymous, and secure. Leo doesn’t record chats, or use them for model training, and no account or login is required to use Leo. With cutting-edge technology and privacy, Brave Leo pushes the boundaries of typical AI chatbot services.

“It is increasingly common today to use AI to ask questions and get assistance. AI can be a powerful tool but it can also present growing concerns for data privacy and there’s a need for a privacy-first solution,” said Brian Bondy, CTO and co-founder of Brave. “Brave is committed to pairing AI with user privacy, and will provide our users with secure and personalized AI assistance where they already spend their time online. We’re also thrilled to work with Anthropic to bring Claude’s exceptional conversational abilities to the millions of Brave users worldwide.”

Introducing Leo Premium

By default, Brave Leo is free for all users, with easy access to the Llama 2 large language model from Meta. For users who want additional models, Brave is also releasing a premium version of Leo for $15/month. Leo Premium subscribers will get access to Claude Instant, Anthropic’s faster and lighter model that excels at logical reasoning and coding. The current version of Claude produces longer, more structured responses, follows instructions better than previous versions of Instant, and shows improvements in math, coding, multilingual abilities, and question answering. Additional models will be available to Leo Premium users, as well as access to higher rate limits, higher-quality conversations, priority queuing during periods of peak usage, and early access to new features and improvements.

This integration represents a milestone in delivering sophisticated natural language conversations powered by AI directly within the browser environment. With Claude’s advanced capabilities and Brave’s focus on user privacy and control, we hope to set a new standard for helpful, responsible, and context sensitive AI interactions. Anthropic used Brave’s Search API to train their latest model, Claude 2, on high-quality data to help optimize Claude’s outputs for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) queries.

“We’re excited that Brave is going to bring our state-of-the-art large language model Claude Instant directly into their browser. Integrating access to Claude seamlessly within Brave gives users assistance whenever they need it, right in the context of the page they are on,” says Matt Bell, Head of Product Research at Anthropic. “Whether Brave users are analyzing text, editing documents, or writing code, they can now benefit from having personalized help from Claude at any time. This integration unlocks the potential for AI to enhance people’s browsing and productivity in an intuitive, contextual way.”

Brave Leo and unparalleled privacy

As a privacy-first company, Brave is dedicated to releasing leading alternatives to popular Web tools that also protect user data and anonymity. Leo is no different:

• Reverse proxy: All requests are proxied through an anonymized server so the request and user-address cannot be linked. Brave cannot associate the user request with their IP address.

• Immediate discarding of responses: Conversations are not persisted on Brave’s servers. Responses from Leo are discarded immediately after they’re generated, and not used for model training. We do not collect identifiers such as your IP Address that can be linked to you. No personal data is retained by the AI model or any 3rd-party model providers.

• No login or account required for access: Users do not need to create a Brave account to use Leo.

• Unlinkable subscription: If you sign up for Leo Premium, you’re issued unlinkable tokens that validate your subscription when using Leo. This means that Brave can never connect your purchase details with your usage of the product, an extra step that ensures your activity is private to you and only you. The email you used to create your account is unlinkable to your day-to-day use of Leo, making this a uniquely private credentialing experience.

Accessing Brave Leo

Leo is now available to Brave desktop users with version 1.60. It will be rolled out in phases over the next few days, so users should check back soon if they’re not seeing it today. It will be available on mobile (Android and iOS) in the coming months. 

Learn more at brave.com/leo, and see details about Leo’s roadmap here.

It’s easy to get started with Brave Leo because it is built right into the Brave desktop browser, and no extra apps or extensions are required. It provides seamless access to AI experiences via the browser address bar, or also as a sidebar, a chat-like interface positioned beside any webpage.

To access Leo, existing Brave users can simply ask a question in the address bar and click “Ask Leo”, or click in Brave Sidebar.