Opera's WebAI brings local AI models to Opera One browser

Opera's move builds on its earlier work to bring locally run models into its browsers, and the company has long made digital privacy a selling point. WebAI is positioned as model-agnostic: Opera cites Google's open-weight Gemma and, on Macs, Apple's on-device foundation model, while saying the standard is built to support a wide range of open-weight AI systems. Open-weight models are typically free to download and use, and their weights are publicly available, giving developers more freedom to customize them, though they still carry some restrictions unlike fully open-source software. Opera's pitch is that developers can add AI features without running infrastructure or paying for every request, while users avoid subscriptions and keep the information local AI handles on their own device. The trade-off is that local processing puts more demand on the user's computer, and Opera acknowledges performance will depend on the device's hardware. The feature is opt-in and starts as an early preview in Opera One, with Opera GX and Opera Neon slated to follow.