The AI browser wars are heating up. Other AI companies like OpenAI and Perplexity have attracted a lot of attention with their new AI-first and agentic browsers. They are being positioned as a direct competitor to Google, which currently holds 70% of the market with its Chrome browser. As the incumbent, Google has been slow to respond to the shift toward AI search – integrating Gemini into Chrome is widely seen as catching up to competitors that were AI-first from day one.
This is understandable, because a $100 billion business is a huge, cumbersome step. This leaves room for maneuver for newcomers, who are essentially starting from a blank slate, and free reign to innovate.
Enter Neo, released today for general availability worldwide – the next step in Norton’s AI innovation journey, building on its leadership in cybersecurity and its bid to deliver the world’s first secure, zero-prompt AI browser. From the beginning, the minds behind Neo made a deliberate choice to focus on a proactive AI assistant rather than chasing today’s agentic trends. Even enthusiasts willing to tolerate the risks face new security and privacy concerns as well as too much unpredictability.
Howie Xu, chief AI and innovation officer at Zen, describes Neo as a browser built to help you before you ask – providing on-page, in-flow support through summaries, reminders and context-aware suggestions without prompts or extra steps.
"It’s as if I have a highly intelligent assistant sitting next to me, helping me absorb and process information much more comprehensively, much faster, much deeper." Xu says. "That assistant is there when you’re reading, when you’re researching, when you’re working on an online project. And depending on your interests and browsing, your assistant can help you every step of the way."
Privacy and security are also integrated from the ground up, borrowing from Norton’s unparalleled consumer security expertise.
"What makes us unique is that we are giving people both peace of mind and AI functionality at the same time." Xu explains. "Norton’s roots are in security. We are the only game in town that has built an AI native browser with security and privacy in mind seamlessly – that will not exploit or use your data for training.
zero-quick difference
Comet (Perplexity) and Atlas (OpenAI) were built by chat-first companies that believe users will actively ask questions. But getting value from AI requires cognitive effort: You have to know what to ask, shift into “question mode,” and understand what the model can actually do. Asking questions isn’t the hard part; Figuring out what to ask requires meta-cognition – awareness of what you don’t know – which makes turning to ChatGPT mid-browsing feel more difficult than expected.
Neo takes the opposite approach. Instead of waiting for you to prompt, it acts first – offering summaries, reminders, relevant news, and even queries based on what you’re searching for.
"Based on my browsing interests, Neo reminds me of events I want to attend, offers personalized news, and presents pre-made questions asking exactly what I want to know," Xu explains. "In other words, I never have to prepare a single prompt – I’m just clicking on information the AI already anticipates for me as I’m prompting.
Because most people don’t know the limitations of AI technology or how to phrase effective signals, expecting them to drive the conversation is unrealistic for many people.
"We decided to remove the burden from the people. Of course, you can still ask questions, but we’re designing for people who want less cognitive load and prefer AI to make the first move," He says. Like the recommendations that appear on any news or retail site, Neo takes advantage of the browsing context to surface the right content at the right time.
Neo can summarize a page and predict questions based on your interests and behaviors. With permission, it can also create detailed reminders – for example, notifying you of repeated visits to Formula 1 websites and prompting you about upcoming races. Control remains with the person using the Neo: if interest wanes, they can delete it from the Neo’s configurable memory.
Because Neo’s browsing history and preferences are stored locally and securely, it can customize prompts, insights and suggestions – from calendar nudges to news recommendations to suggested questions in the Neo chat interface. The result is an AI-powered browser that gives people the benefits of AI without giving them typing prompts. Inline actions like “Summary,” “Add to Calendar?”, “Resume where you left off,” and “Price reduced” make browsing feel fast and light without any extra steps.
A cool-by-design experience based on security
“Calm by design” has guided the development of Neo, and for Xu it boils down to three things: control, privacy and security, all within a clean, streamlined experience that makes browsing fast and easy.
Rooted in Norton’s decades of security expertise, the cool Neo 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 remains on the device unless explicitly allowed otherwise.
Norton-backed security practices suppress instant-injection risks common to other AI browsers, local processing keeps sensitive information contained, and scoped sync ensures only user-approved context is transmitted across devices.
Norton also brings deep web intelligence: spending decades scanning the vast majority of the Internet and developing antivirus capabilities that now understand both static and runtime web content. That real-time insight allows Neo’s built-in antivirus, anti-phishing, and anti-scam technology to detect and shut down malicious behavior and content as it appears.
"When we think about peace of mind, what we really mean is delivering value in a consistent way, in a reliable way, in a way that people can predict, so that people have peace of mind," Xu says. "This is a far cry from the design of agentic browsers out there where the outcome is completely unpredictable, not to mention the associated latency and overhead. I believe continuity is a necessity to bring AI browsers to a larger population. We also have some cool capabilities, but our primary goal is that people can use it in their daily lives without worrying about all the vulnerabilities that most agent browsers offer. Since we are quiet, reliable and safe in design, we are confident that we will win the hearts of a massive audience."
For anyone watching the rapid shift toward AI-powered browsing, Neo shows how Norton is combining assistance, security, and zero-prompt design into a single experience. See it in action on neobrowser.ai.
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