Overview
- Opera released WebAI as an opt-in early preview in Opera One on Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, and said Opera GX and Opera Neon will get the feature soon.
- WebAI is presented as a proposed web standard that is model-agnostic and built around open-weight models, with launch support for Google’s Gemma and Apple’s on-device foundation model on compatible Macs.
- The API lets websites and browser extensions run models locally to generate text, classify content, and find relationships between data, with user permission controls to restrict when local models can be used.
- Opera published developer resources and example extensions, plus an HTML-in-Canvas demo that embeds interactive web pages in 2D and 3D scenes to show practical uses like tab sorting and clickbait detection.
- Local inference shifts compute and memory demands onto users’ hardware, which can slow performance on weaker devices, and broad impact will depend on wider cross-browser adoption and careful handling of remaining privacy risks.