And things seem to be working out.
Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising!
AI SicknessPeople seem to be happy to pay for a version of the browser that has had things taken out of it.
Brave CTO Brian Bondy acknowledged the obvious tension: The company generates revenue from Leo AI, Brave Wallet, Brave Talk, its VPN, and crypto partnerships. Origin removes all of that. The $60 fee compensates for that lost revenue. It's available on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS—and, in a fun twist, completely free on Linux, where the open-source community knows how to do it by themselves anyway.
However, Mozilla isn't abandoning AI either—its free built-in VPN and summarization tools stay available for users who want them—but it's framing "off by default" as a competitive advantage.
DuckDuckGo's actual position on AI is more nuanced than the extension implies. The company still offers Duck.ai, a private chatbot with access to GPT-4o mini, Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, and Mistral Small 3 24B for free within daily limits, with premium plans unlocking Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, and—on the top tier—Claude Opus.
It also built DuckAssist for AI-generated search summaries. The statement on the extension's Chrome listing—"AI should be optional"—is both a product philosophy and a direct acknowledgment that DuckDuckGo has plenty of AI to opt out of.
What all three companies are selling, in different packaging, is the same thing: the right to use software that doesn't assume you want AI.
