Opera unveils WebAI standard to run AI models locally in the browser

Opera wants your browser to do its own thinking. The company has introduced WebAI, a new web standard that lets AI models run directly inside the browser instead of pinging a distant data center. That matters because most AI features today are rented, not owned. Every prompt travels to someone else’s server, and somebody pays the meter. Opera is betting a lot of that work can happen on the machine already sitting on your desk. What Opera is actually shipping Opera released WebAI as an early preview on October 27, 2026. The first home for it is Opera One, the company’s flagship browser. Opera GX and Opera Neon are slated to get the feature later. For now, it targets 64-bit Windows machines and Macs running Apple silicon. The standard is built to be model-agnostic, meaning it is not tied to a single AI system. Opera points to Google’s Gemma as one example of a compatible model. Apple’s on-device foundation model is also supported at launch, on compatible Macs. That gives Mac users a path to local AI using a model their operating system already provides. On the capability side, WebAI covers text generation, content classification, and spotting relationships between data points. Put mo...