Vivaldi Comes Out Swinging Against AI Web Browsers

With web browsers poised to change forever thanks to new agentic AI capabilities, Vivaldi is taking a stand for humanity.

“Across the industry, artificial assistants are being embedded directly into browsers and pitched as a quicker path to answers,” Vivaldi co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner writes. “These moves are reshaping the address bar into an assistant prompt, turning the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship. This shift has major consequences for the web as we know it. Independent research shows users are less likely to click through to original sources when an AI summary is present, which means fewer visits for publishers, creators, and communities that keep the web vibrant.”

He’s right on both counts, of course: Agentic web browsers will lead to a world in which people don’t really browse per se but instead use AI agents to programmatically access websites to get information and complete tasks on our behalf. And this shift will lead to dramatic changes to websites, which will need to adapt to this new world by making their content programmatically accessible instead of relying solely on people to find and then read that content directly.

Most of the truly innovative work in this space right is now happening through smaller upstarts like The Browser Company and Perplexity AI, rather than Big Tech platform makers like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. And that makes it interesting that Vivaldi, which is itself a smaller upstart in this space, is rejecting transforming its own browser into an AI-based solution. Though I suppose the signs were there in that it has never really promoted any AI features at all, choosing instead to focus on personalization, productivity, privacy, and security. And in making the web a better place by doing what it can to end Big Tech’s stranglehold on the industry.

“We’re taking a stand, choosing humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship,” von Tetzchner adds. “Without exploration, the web becomes far less interesting. Our curiosity loses oxygen and the diversity of the web dies. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.”

I suspect this message will resonate with a sizable audience: AI is still inaccurate often enough for thinking people to be wary of it, and rejecting further expansion by Big Tech is clearly the right path for all of us, even those who don’t yet understand why this is so important.

Vivaldi is available for Windows, Windows 11 on Arm, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone, and iPad. You can learn more on the Vivaldi website.