Opera just rolled out early public access for its new AI-powered web browser, Neon, and it comes with a pretty hefty price tag for what is typically a free software application.
The Norway-based web company announced today that anyone willing to shell out $19.90 a month can start using Opera Neon. The browser first debuted in October in an invite-only early access program.
“With Opera Neon, you’re getting access to an agentic workspace that gives you access to the newest and most powerful AI technologies and models as they emerge,” the company said in a press release today.
Opera says the high price is due to the AI agents and models that come packaged with it, including Gemini 3 Pro, OpenAI GPT 5.1, Veo 3.1, and Nano Banana Pro. Users would typically have to pay for these models individually.
The launch comes as the industry is trying to move beyond what now seem like simple chatbot interfaces and into browsers with somewhat autonomous agentic capabilities. Perplexity and OpenAI already have their own browsers, Comet and Atlas. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have introduced AI features into Chrome and Edge. But experts are already warning that AI browsers come with own major unique cybersecurity risks.
According to Opera, Neon is fully equipped with four specialized AI agents. The first is Chat, which functions like a normal chatbot where users can ask it questions and have a conversation with it.
The second, Neon Do, works more like an actual agent that can navigate the internet on its own and handle tasks like researching a topic and summarize findings right in a Google Doc.
Neon Make is the browser’s “creation studio,” capable of generating code, apps, images, and videos.
ODRA is its deep-research agent, built to break down complex topics like “urban vertical farming” into structured reports that can be exported as PDFs.
Neon can also juggle multiple tasks at once, basically treating AI projects the same way traditional browsers treat tabs. Users can also set up “Cards,” which are specific instructions that can be added to prompts for workflows they regularly use.
The risks of AI web browsers
The rollout of Opera Neon comes just a week after security analyst firm Gartner recommended that companies block employees from using AI browsers. In its report, Gartner warned that these browsers could expose sensitive user information because they can collect data about active web content, browser history, and open tabs. But the bigger concern was a new kind of attack called “indirect prompt injections,” which are unique to AI agents.
Because AI agents can navigate the web and complete tasks on their own, they could potentially encounter malicious web pages or code designed to trick them into ignoring their safety guardrails. If that happens, an agent could end up sharing sensitive user data or even performing unauthorized actions, like financial transactions.
The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre warned about these attacks in a blog post this past Monday, saying there’s a “good chance prompt injection will never be properly mitigated.”
“Rather than hoping we can apply a mitigation that fixes prompt injection, we instead need to approach it by seeking to reduce the risk and the impact,” the post read. “If the system’s security cannot tolerate the remaining risk, it may not be a good use case for LLMs.”
Opera is aware of the issue. In October, the company disclosed that a team of security researchers had alerted it that Neon was vulnerable to a specific prompt-injection attack scenario. Opera says it successfully patched the browser to address the example that the researchers provided.
Google has also been working on a fix. The company introduced this week what it’s calling the “User Alignment Critic,” a separate AI model that runs alongside an AI agent but isn’t exposed to third-party content. The idea is to help vet an agent’s plan before it executes a task and make sure it actually aligns with what a user wants it to do. In other words, it plans to use AI to keep tabs on its AI.
It might be worth waiting to see how this tech holds up on the open web before you start opening your wallet.
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