I read an article recently about benefits of using Brave. I ditched google years ago, then FF, and wanted something safer. Brave was recommended. Reviews were good and not good but there was nothing that said the search would use AI (it appears only). As soon as I installed it and saw the AI search, I looked for a way of removing it.
I’m on a mac. Can it be removed? If so, how? Don’t have me drop into the OSX to do pseudo AIX/Unix line commands. I’ve forgotten a lot of that.
Thanks.
@yoohoo to which extent and location do you mean? To be clear, Leo is part of the browser and there’s no way to “remove” it, but you can disable functionality and hide buttons.
For example:
If you mean the bar like above that appears as you type in the address bar, you can disable that at brave://settings/appearance. It is one of the autocomplete suggestions:
In the appearance settings is also the toggle to hide the Leo AI button 
. Just change the toggle and that doesn’t appear.
Then there’s all the settings at brave://settings/leo-ai
Go to brave://flags and you can disable Brave AI Chat:
Hey @yoohoo, thanks for your message. It seems like an issue for Brave Search (the search engine) rather than for Leo (the Browser AI assistant) but as far as I know you should be able to turn off AI in brave search through https://search.brave.com/settings
@yoohoo On another comment of yours, there was mention it as a privacy invader:
To be clear, Leo is a privacy preserving AI assistant. You may wish to read up more on it later through articles like https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#brave-leo
It is also open source. Tools exist there for you to even control it and have it use your own locally trained model if you so desired.
I understand that. I’ll turn it off (thanks). But I read a long chat here with someone who sounded like a developer who said turning something for AI off (disabling it maybe) didn’t disable the code. He kept checking it in the code. I worked on mainframes and saw the “bad stuff” with PCs grow so I expected privacy invasion.
I turn off Leo’s field and does that allow a normal search or is AI still out there and on? Sorry but the stuff that’s coming is scary and AI compounds it.
@yoohoo Leo is built-in AI on the browser. The code is going to be there regardless if you want to use the browser. The only way you can have it gone is if you forked a version of Brave on your own where you strip out all of the code, but that would be a lot of work.
You can disable features and functionality such as I shared.
In terms of Brave Search, that is completely different than the AI in the browser. It is web based. You can turn off the prompt as Ste mentioned earlier, but it still can decide to answer on its own depending on the type of question you ask…even if it was disabled. And the Answer With AI buttons still will be there, as they don’t have a disable for it.
Big important thing to realize is Brave doesn’t collect your data. It’s not like Google or others where your data is constantly collected, used, and sold. That link I shared, it would tell you the following:
Brave Leo includes multiple privacy protections regardless of which feature you’re using:
- Immediate discarding of responses: Conversations are not persisted on Brave’s servers. We do not collect identifiers that can be linked to you (such as IP address). Responses generated are discarded after they’re generated, and not used for model training; no personal data is retained.
- Optional features: Features like Tab Focus Mode require explicit opt-in before any data is processed.
- No login requirement: Users do not need to create a Brave account to use the free version of Leo.
- Unlinkable subscription: If you sign up for Leo Premium, you’re issued unlinkable tokens that validate your subscription when using Leo. This means that Brave can never connect your purchase details with your usage of the product, an extra step that ensures your activity is private to you and only you. The email you used to create your account is unlinkable to your day-to-day use of Leo, making this a uniquely private credentialing experience.
I understand your concern. There is a lot of information out there about privacy, and some of it is solid while some is meant to grab attention by making things sound scarier than they really are. It is good to take those kinds of claims with a grain of salt, keep asking questions, and check the facts like you are doing now.
The nice thing with Brave is that it is open source, so if there were hidden tracking, people in the privacy community would spot it quickly. Brave’s policy is also clear that they do not collect your data in the first place, so even if Leo is on, there is nothing being stored or harvested.
I have seen people online say things in a way that makes you feel like you should never turn on a computer again. Sometimes it is worth a chuckle, but it is also a reminder that research and fact-checking are the best tools to sort out what is real and what is just noise.
I understand. I appreciate your patience. I went from goo to FF to duckduckgo. Duck also doesn’t track searches and we’re on our own going into websites (make perfect sense). I know there’s a bunch of stuff that’s incorrect on the internet (and I get wrong info from friends and I’ve told them to factcheck or I won’t read their emails).
I’ll never trust anything on a computer and with the privacy being stripped away over decades, it’s bad for us. But I saw what I considered to be unethical coding (and functions) requested in business requirements (may be meaningless to you - I tested, did minor old coding and used BRs). I also saw things happening early in the PC process (goes back to OS2 and OS2 Warp) that were warning signs about things to come and what I saw as the future kept materializing so having a lot of trust in a computer system is an oxymoron to me. Folks just call me paranoid until things that I’ve said actually happen 
.
Thanks to both of you. You’ve been a great help.
What’s your threat model?
Normal search also sends your query to the server to perform the search. Asking an LLM that runs on the same datacenter about your search is no extra invasion of your privacy, the exact some information has leaked, or not leaked, whether the LLM is asked or not. If the LLM was provided by a different company than the one providing the search functionality, I’d understand you not wanting to send your queries over there, but, AFAIK, they are provided by the same company: Brave.
Sir this is not an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure.
Hello, thank you for providing solution. I would also like to add that if you are continuously clearing cookies from the browser, my hypothesis is that the AI integrated in brave search turns on.
Also, I would like to ask if it is also possible to remove Leo AI from the top-right burger menu? I somehow integrated this (https://github.com/MulesGaming/brave-debloatinator\) on Debian and it made it disappear. However, it doesn’t on Windows.
Also, even though it is built-in, shouldn’t it be considered that AI is a separate tool than browser?
Thanks
I, like many others, have grown to hate Leo insisting on re-enabling itself whenever I do a search in the brave app for Android. I’m using a Galaxy S24 Ultra.
It’s maddening that no matter how many times I turn it off or go into the flags or go into various geeky steps, it just comes back.
I’m not concerned about privacy. I’m just annoyed by the fact that it’s so, annoyingly, frequently, wrong.
Finally I went into the search settings of the app and switched all searches to DuckDuckGo. Presto! No annoying Leo AI when I search!
After I find a site that I want to browse, I can still access that site within the Brave browser which is pretty great for privacy and also eliminating cookie consent pop-ups things like that as well as ad blocking.
After over a year of frustration I’m finally able to use Brave again on my phone the way I used to prior to idiotic Leo. Happy! 
By the way, when I want to use AI, I use Grok. I pay about 40 bucks a month for the second highest tier, and I get answers that are 95% hallucination free and so much better than Leo. Still not perfect, but useful most of the time.
Most of the major browsers right now are integrating AI in some form into the browser.
What should and what should not be integrated into the browser changes over time, as tech and user expectations move on. Features such as print preview, spellcheck in forms and viewing pdfs used not to be integrated into the browser but now all browsers have those.
Having said that, at this point in time, Vivaldi has made an explicit choice not to integrate AI, although they admit they may revisit this in the future.
(I actually use Brave and Vivaldi in different contexts. In Vivaldi I actually use Brave Search as default.)
does not work. does not stay.
no appearance setting in android app
there are no settings there and that flag may cause loss of bookmarks and privacy
@loveprivacy if you want to be more specific on what you’re hoping to get, we can get to it. But let’s touch on at least what you mentioned here.
Just looking at face value, you’re wrong.
But let me not be pedantic and say you’re referencing the idea that the autocomplete options aren’t listed in Appearance like it is on Desktop. You’d be correct there. On Android you would disable via the Leo settings. That’s Settings → Leo. Here you’ll see you can enable/disable autocomplete suggestions for Leo, can choose whether it shows up in quick search engines, etc.
Why are you making this claim? Disabling Leo (Brave AI Chat) in brave://flags would have absolutely no impact on a loss of bookmarks or privacy.
Thanks. I could not find “Appearance” on the day I posted, by it is there now. Switching off those things in Leo settings doesn’t work.
Either that’s what showed on the screen when I attempted it or that’s what Leo showed when I put a question about it in the search bar. Can’t remember, but not fond of losing bookmarks or the functioning of my browser, so I chose to heed the warning.
