The AI browser wars are heating up. OpenAI and other AI corporations like Perplexity have gotten quite a lot of attention with their recent AI-first and agentic browsers. They're being positioned as direct competition to Google, which currently holds a 70% share of the market with its Chrome browser. Because the incumbent, Google has been slower to answer the shift toward AI search — integrating Gemini into Chrome, is widely seen as playing catch-up to competitors that were AI-first from day one.
It's comprehensible, as a $100 billion business is an unlimited, unwieldy beast to pivot. That leaves space for the brand new guys to maneuver, who’re essentially starting with blank slates, and free reign for innovation.
Enter Neo, released for worldwide general availability today — the following step in Norton’s AI innovation journey, constructing on its leadership in cyber safety and its bid to deliver the world’s first secure, zero-prompt AI browser. From the start, the minds behind Neo made a deliberate selection to concentrate on a proactive AI assistant fairly than chase today’s agentic trends. Even enthusiasts willing to tolerate the risks face an excessive amount of unpredictability, together with recent safety and privacy concerns.
Howie Xu, chief AI & innovation officer at Gen, describes Neo as a browser built to assist before you ask — delivering on-page, in-flow support through summaries, reminders, and context-aware suggestions without prompts or extra steps.
"It's like having a very smart assistant sitting next to me, helping me absorb and process information far more broadly, much faster, much deeper," Xu says. "That assistant is there whenever you're reading, whenever you're researching, whenever you're working on a web-based project. And based in your interests and browsing, your assistant can enable you to at every step."
Borrowing from Norton's unique consumer security expertise, privacy and safety has also been integrated from the bottom up.
"What makes us unique is that we're giving people each peace of mind and AI functionality at the identical time," Xu explains. "Norton’s roots are in security. We’re the one game on the town that built an AI native browser from the bottom up with safety and privacy at its core —one which won’t exploit or use your data for training.
The zero-prompt difference
Comet (Perplexity) and Atlas (OpenAI) were built by chat-first corporations that assume users will actively ask questions. But getting value from AI takes cognitive effort: it is advisable know what to ask, shift into “query mode,” and understand what the model can actually do. Asking a matter isn’t the hard part; realizing what to ask requires meta-cognition — awareness of what you don’t know — which makes turning to ChatGPT in the midst of browsing feel harder than it should.
Neo takes the alternative approach. As a substitute of waiting so that you can prompt it, it acts first — offering summaries, reminders, relevant news, and even questions you’re more likely to explore.
"Based on my browsing interests, Neo jogs my memory of events I’d need to attend, surfaces personalized news, and presents pre-generated questions that I actually need to explore," Xu explains. "In other words, I’ve never needed to formulate a single prompt — I’m simply clicking on insights the AI has already anticipated for me as if I had been prompting.”
Because most individuals don’t know the boundaries of AI technology or the way to phrase effective prompts, expecting them to drive the interaction is unrealistic for many individuals.
"We decided to shift the burden away from people. You possibly can still ask questions, in fact, but we’re designing for individuals who want less cognitive load and like AI to take step one," he says. Very like the recommendations that surface on any news or retail site, Neo leverages browsing context to surface the suitable content at the suitable moment.
Neo can summarize a page and anticipate questions based in your interests and behaviors. With permission, it could also create detailed reminders — for instance, noticing repeat visits to Formula 1 web sites and prompting you about upcoming races. Control stays with the person using Neo: if an interest fades, they’ll remove it from Neo’s Configurable Memory.
Because Neo’s browsing history and preferences are stored locally and securely, it could customize prompts, insights, and suggestions — from calendar nudges to news recommendations to suggested questions within the Neo Chat interface. The result’s an AI-powered browser that offers people the advantages of AI without typing prompts. Inline actions like “Summary,” “Add to calendar?,” “Resume where you left off,” and “Price dropped” make browsing feel faster and lighter, without extra steps.
A relaxed-by-design experience grounded in security
“Calm by design” has guided Neo’s development, and for Xu that comes all the way down to three things: control, privacy, and security, all inside a clean, streamlined experience that makes browsing faster and easier.
Rooted in Norton’s a long time of security expertise, Neo’s calm experience starts with privacy and protection. Xu views it because the bedrock of Neo’s approach: the corporate never knows what you’re doing, because all personal data stays on the device unless explicitly permitted otherwise.
Norton-backed security practices suppress prompt-injection risks common in other AI browsers, local processing keeps sensitive information contained, and scoped sync ensures only user-approved context carries across devices.
Norton also brings deep web intelligence: a long time of scanning the overwhelming majority of the web and evolving antivirus capabilities that now understand each static and runtime web content. That real-time insight allows Neo’s in-built antivirus, anti-phishing, and anti-scam technology to detect and shut down malicious behavior and content the moment it appears.
"Once we take into consideration calm, what we actually mean is delivering value in a consistent way, in a reliable way, in a way that folks can predict, so people have peace of mind," Xu says. "This may be very different from the design of the agentic browsers on the market where the result is solely unpredictable, not to say the associated latency and overhead. I imagine consistency is a necessity for us to push an AI browser to a mass population. Now we have some flashy capabilities too, but our primary goal is that folks can just use it of their every day lives without ever having to fret about all of the vulnerabilities that almost all agentic browsers introduce. Since we're calm, reliable and secure by design, we imagine we’ll win the hearts of a mass audience."
For anyone watching the rapid shift toward AI-powered browsing, Neo shows how Norton is fusing assistance, security, and zero-prompt design right into a single experience. See it in motion at neobrowser.ai.
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