AI is absolutely everywhere, but what if you don’t want it? One browser company has declared that it will remain blissfully AI-free.

Vivaldi has stated that it will not add AI to its browser, citing concerns about accuracy, ethics, and the environment. With even Firefox experimenting with AI assistants, having a refuge like this is more important than ever. One of the dangers of our internet monoculture, dominated by a few platforms, is that it’s hard to escape whatever Silicon Valley decides we should do next. The even better news is that Vivaldi is a pretty great browser, and available almost everywhere.

"[P]ropes to the Vivaldi team for taking such a clear and uncompromising stance. There's a lot of pressure from big money to add machine learning to everything from your operating system to your nail scissors, and popular tech publishers are sure to publish articles criticizing Vivaldi's choice, so they're not doing this without some risk," writes operating system and open source expert Thom Holwerda on his OS News blog.

AI is absolutely everywhere now, and it seems increasingly difficult to escape it. On the one hand, you have large corporations like Microsoft and Apple who scour the “open web” for copyrighted data to feed their training models without asking permission or offering anyone a way to opt in. On the other hand, you have operating system features like Microsoft’s CoPilot Recall or pretty much the entirety of iOS 18 that force AI features on users with no way to opt out other than by not buying the latest devices.