Brave Leo is an artificial intelligence assistant built directly into the Brave browser, designed to answer questions, summarize content, and generate text while maintaining strict privacy standards. Users can ask Leo to summarize webpages, documents, or PDFs, request explanations and related information, or generate content such as articles, essays, emails, and code samples. The assistant can translate between languages and provide coding help with suggested and sample code for software applications and database queries, and on iOS it can also accept questions via voice to text.
Leo runs inside the Brave browser on desktop for macOS, Windows, and Linux, as well as on mobile for Android and iOS. It can be accessed by typing in the address bar and choosing “Ask Leo,” clicking the Leo icon in the toolbar, or tapping the Leo artificial intelligence icon from the browser menu on mobile. Leo can analyze PDFs, Google Docs & Google Sheets, and other content directly from the current tab, and can organize and find tabs related to a specific topic or gather them into a new window. Brave Search is used to enhance Leo’s answers with richer details and up to date information.
Privacy is central to Leo’s design, and the service does not retain or share chats or use them for additional model training. With respect to the servers that power Brave Leo, the browser sends the latest prompt, the context of the current conversation, and when necessary the required context from the page being viewed, but Brave states that it does not collect identifiers that can be linked to the user and no personal data is retained. No account or signup is required for the free Leo experience, and Leo Premium subscribers create a Premium account only for access verification, with that account described as completely unlinkable to usage of Leo itself.
Both the free and Premium versions of Brave Leo offer access to the latest models from Mixtral, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama, and users can open Leo to see exactly which model versions are currently available. A feature called Bring Your Own Model allows people to run their own artificial intelligence models, whether local or remote, and to connect to third party APIs while retaining Brave’s privacy posture. Brave Leo is free to use, and it is also available as a premium experience with access to more models and faster responses, and subscribers receive higher usage limits when traffic is heavy.
Chat history can be stored locally on the device regardless of which models are selected, allowing users to save and revisit conversations or continue them later. History is accessible via a full page view at brave://leo-ai, which displays prior conversations in a left column, or through the browser sidebar by opening the Leo icon, selecting the “…” menu, and choosing conversation history. Users can also opt for temporary chats that are not logged in history and can be instantly deleted when closed.
Brave warns that, as with any artificial intelligence system, Leo’s responses may contain misleading information, factual inaccuracies, bias, harmful content, or hallucinations, and recommends double checking responses, for example by using Brave Search. If users see concerning outputs, they can provide feedback by clicking the menu next to Leo’s response and selecting a feedback option. Overall, Leo combines private, in browser conversational assistance with flexible model choices, integrated search, and local control over chat storage and deletion.
