Overview
- Opera released an opt-in early preview of WebAI in Opera One on October 27, 2026, and says Opera GX and Opera Neon will get the feature soon.
- WebAI is a proposed, model-agnostic web standard that lets websites and extensions call AI models running on a user’s device rather than sending data to cloud servers.
- Opera published developer APIs for text generation, content classification and semantic embeddings and shipped six example extensions to show practical uses such as article highlighting and quizzes.
- The preview supports Google’s Gemma models and, on compatible Macs, Apple’s on-device foundation model, but Opera’s claim of backing from Google and Microsoft was reported by outlets and not independently verified.
- At launch WebAI targets Apple silicon Macs and 64-bit Intel/AMD Windows PCs, and Opera warns that on-device inference cuts cloud costs and some data-exfiltration risk while shifting compute load to users’ hardware and leaving some privacy and security risks intact.