Brave’s Leo: Private AI browsing for data professionals

# Why data professionals should consider Leo

Data professionals spend their days reading papers, internal docs, GitHub repos, and model cards in a browser. Popular AI assistants integrated with browsers (for example, Google Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT) can improve productivity but often route queries and page content to cloud services where inputs may be logged or used to improve models. That creates a privacy risk when working with proprietary datasets, client research, or unreleased model details.

Brave's Leo is an alternative designed around preventing that risk. It's a sidebar AI assistant built into the Brave browser that reads the page you're viewing, answers questions, and—by default—does not store, log, or use your inputs for model training. You do not need an account to use the free tier.

# How Leo's privacy model differs

• Queries are routed through a reverse proxy that strips your IP address before reaching the underlying model.

• No account linkage for free users, and inputs are not used for training models.

# support

# Models available and when to use them

• Meta's Llama 3.1 — general-purpose tasks
• Alibaba's Qwen 3 — multilingual content and structured reasoning
• Anthropic's Claude Haiku 3.5 — fast summarization
• GLM family models — additional open options

For most everyday tasks—summarizing papers, explaining documentation, answering questions about open code—the free tier handles the workload. Leo Premium ($14.99/month or $149.99/year) unlocks Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5, higher rate limits, and priority access. Premium covers up to five devices. Premium users can enable persistent chat history, but that is off by default.

# Practical workflows for data teams

• Summarize long papers and create concise notes without uploading texts to external cloud services.
• Walk through internal API specs or model cards by pasting excerpts into the sidebar and asking targeted questions.
• Use multilingual Qwen 3 for translated documentation or international research.
• Keep sensitive queries local by leaving persistent history disabled.

# Comparison to mainstream options

• Google Gemini: capable but consumer plans may use inputs to improve services and can involve human review.
• Perplexity: strong citation-backed answers but routes queries and page content to cloud servers.
• Apple Intelligence: processes more on-device but is restricted to Apple hardware.

Leo's architecture removes account linkage and training-use by default, which is an operational difference rather than a minor setting change.

# Setup checklist