Brave Announces Verifiable and Transparent TEE Support in Leo

Today, Brave announced that their Leo AI assistant inside of the Brave browser will utilize NEAR AI Nvidia-backed Trusted Execution Environments (TEE).

TEEs provide an isolated, secure environment for processing user requests. The isolation works at the hardware level, and allows users to remotely cryptographically attest that their requests are actually running in a secure environment and that they're using the desired LLM.

The Confidential Computing technology is designed to protect against malicious infrastructure providers, including the owners of the servers the models are running on, and provide strong integrity guarantees, preventing tampering of your results.

Hardware isolation ensures that even a fully compromised OS cannot access or tamper with any code or data residing inside the TEE. In addition to this, TEEs expose unique hardware primitives such as secure boot and remote attestation to ensure only trusted code is loaded into the TEE and so that external parties are able to verify the integrity of TEE.

The new technology is available in Brave Nightly builds for early testing and feedback.

This announcement comes as the latest in a series of announcements from various AI providers who wish to improve the privacy and security of their AI offerings. First was Apple with their Private Cloud Compute, then Google with their Private AI Compute, then OpenAI announced plans to implement "client-side encryption" for ChatGPT.

This is another great development for private AI, I hope to see more and more AI providers adopting technologies like this to protect the privacy of their users.