Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich (born 1961) wrote JavaScript at Netscape in ten days in 1995 — the language that went on to run essentially every web page on Earth. He co-founded Mozilla and served briefly as its CEO in 2014 before resigning amid controversy over a political donation, then founded Brave Software, whose privacy-first browser now counts tens of millions of monthly users alongside its independent Brave Search engine.

Shipping AI, on his own terms

Under Eich, Brave became one of the first browsers to build AI in rather than bolt it on. Leo, its native AI assistant, shipped to desktop users in late 2023 and to mobile soon after, with a deliberately un-Big-Tech design: no conversation logging, no use of chats for training, and model choice for users. Brave Search data feeds the company’s own LLM work, making AI a core pillar of the business rather than a demo.

In November 2025 Eich co-authored the announcement of Leo’s next step: running inference inside Trusted Execution Environments so that privacy claims become cryptographically checkable rather than promises — “trust but verify,” a phrase he has used since his Mozilla days. The launch, first in Brave’s Nightly build with the DeepSeek V3.1 model, drew coverage as a first for mainstream browser AI.

Eich’s pro-AI position comes with sharp elbows for how incumbents deploy it. At Consensus 2024 he warned that Google’s AI summaries turn search into an unaccountable “answer engine” with “no links to check,” and at Permissionless 2025 he told developers, per Blockworks, that human intelligence is not about to be surpassed by these models — urging them to stay human, and to keep writing and reading code. For Eich the fight is not whether AI belongs in the browser, but who controls it and whether its privacy can be proven.