Opera has released an early version of support for WebAI, a proposed web standard designed to let websites and browser extensions run generative AI models directly on the user's computer rather than sending data to remote servers.
The implementation first appears in Opera One, with plans to bring the same capabilities to Opera GX and Neon in the future. According to the company's official announcement, WebAI works with multiple models, including Gemma from Google. On compatible Apple hardware it also supports Apple's own local foundational model, and the standard deliberately avoids tying users to any single provider.
Available functions include text generation, content classification, and analysis of connections between different pieces of information. By moving inference to the local device, developers can add these features without maintaining their own server-side AI infrastructure or paying for every cloud request. End users likewise do not need a subscription to an external AI service.
Activation is voluntary. Because all computations happen on the device, data processed by the local model never leaves the computer for a cloud provider. The trade-off is increased load on the user's hardware, with performance varying according to the capabilities of the installed CPU, GPU, and available memory.


