The AI browser wars are heating up. OpenAI and other AI companies like Perplexity have gained a lot of attention for their up-to-date agent-based and AI-based browsers. They are positioned as direct competition to Google, which currently holds 70% of the market share of its Chrome browser. As the incumbent, Google has been slower to respond to the shift towards AI-powered search – Gemini’s integration with Chrome is widely seen as a way to catch up to competitors that have been betting on AI from day one.
This is understandable because a $100 billion business is a huge and unwieldy beast to pivot. This leaves room for maneuver for up-to-date players, who essentially start with a immaculate slate, and freedom to innovate.
Enter Neo, available globally today, is the next step in Norton’s AI innovation journey, building on its leadership in cybersecurity and its commitment to deliver the world’s first secure, zero-action AI browser. From the very beginning, Neo’s creators made a conscious decision to focus on the proactive AI assistant, rather than following today’s agent trends. Even enthusiasts who are willing to tolerate risk face too much unpredictability, as well as up-to-date security and privacy concerns.
Howie Xu, director of artificial intelligence and innovation at Gen, describes Neo as a browser built to assist before you ask – providing on-page support in the form of summaries, reminders and contextual suggestions without prompts or extra steps.
“It’s as if a very intelligent assistant was sitting next to me, helping me absorb and process information more broadly, much faster and deeper,” says Xu. “This assistant is with you as you read, research, or work on a project online. And based on your interests and the websites you browse, your assistant can help you every step of the way.”
Drawing on Norton’s unique expertise in consumer security, privacy and security are also integrated from the ground up.
“What sets us apart is that we provide people with peace of mind and the functionality of artificial intelligence at the same time,” Xu explains. “Norton’s roots are in security. We’re the only game in town that has built a native AI browser from the ground up with security and privacy at its core – one that won’t use your data for training purposes.
Zero immediate difference
Comet (Perplexity) and Atlas (OpenAI) were built by chat-based companies that assume users will actively ask questions. However, getting value from AI requires cognitive effort: you need to know what to ask, get into “question mode” and understand what the model can actually do. Asking questions isn’t the hardest part; realizing what to ask requires metacognition—knowing what you don’t know—which makes turning to ChatGPT while browsing seem more difficult than it should be.
Neo takes the opposite approach. Instead of waiting for you to ask it, it acts first – offering summaries, reminders, relevant news, and even questions you’re likely to explore further.
“Based on my browsing interests, Neo reminds me of events I might want to attend, displays personalized messages, and presents pre-generated questions that I really want to know,” Xu explains. “In other words, I never had to make a single suggestion — I just clicked on the information that the AI had already predicted for me, as if I were providing it.”
Since most people don’t know the limits of AI technology or how to formulate effective suggestions, expecting them to drive interaction is unrealistic for many people.
“We decided to take this burden away from humans. Of course, you can still ask questions, but we design for those who want less cognitive load and prefer to let artificial intelligence take the first step,” he says. Like recommendations that appear on news or shopping sites, Neo uses your browsing context to show you the right content at the right time.
Neo can summarize the page and predict questions based on your interests and behavior. With permission, it can also create detailed reminders – for example, notifying you of repeated visits to Formula 1 websites and informing you about upcoming races. Control remains in the hands of the person using the Neo: if interest wanes, they can delete it from the Neo Configurable Memory.
Because Neo’s browsing history and preferences are stored locally and securely, it can customize suggestions, insights, and suggestions – from calendar prompts to news recommendations to suggested questions in the Neo Chat interface. The result is an AI-powered browser that provides users with the benefits of AI without having to type prompts. Built-in actions such as “Summary”, “Add to Calendar?”, “Resume where you left off” and “Discounted Price” make browsing faster and easier, without requiring additional steps.
A peaceful experience based on safety
“Peace by design” has guided the development of Neo, and for Xu it comes down to three things: control, privacy and security, all in a immaculate, streamlined environment that makes browsing faster and easier.
Drawing on Norton’s decades of security experience, Neo’s peace of mind experience starts with privacy and security. Xu sees this as the basis of Neo’s approach: the company never knows what you’re doing because all personal data stays on the device unless otherwise expressly permitted.
Norton-backed security practices reduce the risk of instant injection common to other AI browsers, local processing stores sensitive information, and scoped synchronization ensures that only user-approved context is transferred across devices.
Norton also provides deep web intelligence: decades of scanning the extensive majority of the Internet and evolving antivirus capabilities that now support both immobile and running web content. With this real-time insight, Neo’s built-in antivirus, anti-phishing and anti-fraud technology detects and blocks malicious behavior and content as it occurs.
“When we think about peace of mind, what we really mean is delivering value in a consistent, reliable and predictable way so that people have peace of mind,” says Xu. “This is very different from the design of agent browsers, where the outcome is simply unpredictable, not to mention the latency and overhead involved. I believe consistency is a must for us to bring an AI browser to the mass population. We also have some compelling capabilities, but our main goal is that people can simply use it in their daily lives without having to worry about all the security vulnerabilities that most agent browsers introduce. Because we are restful, reliable, and secure by design, we believe that we will win the hearts of the mass audience.”
For anyone watching the rapid shift toward AI-powered browsing, Neo shows how Norton combines help, security, and guided design into one experience. See it in action on neobrowser.ai.
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