Is the Brave AI chat assistant a good alternative to trust?

Hi all.

I am a Brave browser user and I am considering subscribing to the Brave AI chat assistant called Leo.

How does it compare to other AI chat bot assistants? Is it a good alternative? For example, Brave AI vs chatGPT, Brave AI vs Copilot, Brave AI vs Claude, Brave vs Bing Chat.

Also, are my chats and conversations private? Is it more private than other alternatives?

I am generally worried about having long chats and conversations and having that text used to train a model or violating my privacy.

Is Leo private?

Thank you

@hortense,
Thank you for writing in.
While this is a great question, it is a tough one to answer objectively. At this point in time, the common advice would be to “use the AI that best suits you and your needs”. This is because most chat bots have plenty of overlap — like the ability to answer questions, summarize data, and generate specific text when given the appropriate prompt — so the “correct” one for you would be the one that differentiates itself from the pack with some specific feature or mode that suits you.

Bing chat, for example (powered by Copilot), has direct access to Bing Search results, allowing it to give comprehensive answers to users’ questions and additional is known for having a very “easy to talk to”/conversational tone, making it a very approachable option for users.

To me, it seems that your primary concern is the privacy of your chat messages, which is where Brave Leo does stand out from the crowd. You can read more about how Leo keeps your data and conversations private here, but the bulleted points are:

  • Reverse proxy: All requests are proxied through an anonymizing server so that the request and the user’s IP address cannot be linked.
  • 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 with Brave-hosted models are discarded after they’re generated, and not used for model training; no personal data is retained by Brave-hosted AI models.
  • No login or account required for access: 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.

Hope this helps!