Brave Browser is a popular Chromium based browser that delivers a private and secure browsing experience. It has become one of our favorite browsers and one of our top recommendations for privacy-friendly internet surfing.
Leo AI by Brave has now dropped with Brave version v1.60. Unlike ChatGPT and other AI products, Leo has much better privacy protections in place.
Brave Leo is available at no additional cost to Brave desktop users, you should see the Leo symbol in the browser’s sidebar, once Brave rolls it out to you. (IOS and Android support coming soon)
Leo comes equipped with access to the Llama 13b large language model from Meta. For users seeking more advanced features, Brave also offers a Premium version of Leo for 15$ a month, which unlocks access to Claude Instant — Anthropic's LLM1 that specializes in logical reasoning and coding, as well as the ability to provide more structured responses, multilingual capabilities, and higher-quality conversations.
According to Brave’s support page, Leo offers the following privacy features:
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.
We asked Leo to introduce itself to you, our readers. Here’s what it had to say about itself:
LLM: Stands for Large Language Model. It's a type of artificial intelligence model that is trained on a large dataset of text to generate language outputs that are coherent and natural-sounding.