Brave Leo Gets End-to-end Encrypted Chat

Brave has partnered with NEAR AI to deliver end-to-end encrypted chats to its privacy-first Leo AI assistant.

“In 2014, I argued in ‘Trust but Verify’ that users shouldn’t have to place blind trust in the software they rely on,” Brave CEO Brendan Eich says. “They should be able to verify it; this is a user-first principle. AI has raised the stakes, yet too much of it still runs on ‘trust me bro’ promises, often at the user’s expense. With the NEAR AI integration in Brave Leo, we’re bringing unmatched ‘trust but verify’ principles to AI: Your conversation is sealed in your browser, opened only inside verified TEEs hosting your choice of open-source models, and the code that proves privacy is open for anyone to check. This is a first for AI chats in browsers and we’re excited to offer this thanks to our longstanding partnership with NEAR.”

With this update, Leo conversations with the open-weight GLM 5.3 Flash model are protected by end-to-end encryption and hardware-backed confidential computing. The browser encrypts your prompts on your device using Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) before it leaves the device so that only an attested Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) can decrypt them and run confidential LLM inference on them. Your IP address stays hidden during this process and the GLM 5.3 Flash model runs inside a sealed, Nvidia-backed hardware enclave operated by NEAR AI that protects your prompts and responses from Brave, NEAR AI, and everyone else, including infrastructure operators.

Leo’s new end-to-end encrypted chat functionality is available now in Brave Release, Beta, and Nightly, and you need to select GLM 5.3 Flash in Brave Leo to access this feature.

Looking ahead, Brave says that it will move attestation checks right into the web browser–this occurs in the TEE right now–improve enclave attestation, and bring this capability to other open weight models in Leo.