Install · How it works · Documentation · Specs · Report a vulnerability

Not a released or supported Brave product. Brave does not release or support bravebot at this time. It is early, and it is being developed in the open. Binaries, the install script, and the npm package are published for early testing and feedback only. Brave expects to release and support it as a product in the future.

Brave Bot is a general-purpose agent, meant as a drop-in replacement for Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode. Brave has always shipped user agents, and this one is the user's agent in both senses:

• Structural resistance to indirect prompt injection: no untrusted data the agent reads can redirect it, whether a web page, a file, a command's output, a tool's result or an email.
• As few tokens as possible.
• As fast as it can be.
• Nothing hidden: what it read and what it decided are on the screen.
• Developed completely in the open.
• No lock-in: Brave Leo, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock, OpenRouter and other OpenAI-compatible gateways, and local models in Ollama, LM Studio and llama-server, with settings on your own machine.
• Easy to switch to: it reads AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md where there is none) and skills in .claude/skills, offers on first run to copy the model service Claude Code or opencode already reaches, and imports Claude Code sessions with bravebot sessions import claude-code.
• Where you work: the terminal, an editor that speaks the Agent Client Protocol such as Zed (bravebot-acp), and scripts and pipes (bravebot -p).
• The power of a shell without the risk: command lines are compiled into the trust model rather than handed to one.

Getting started

npm install -g @brave/bravebot

Or on macOS and Linux, without npm:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brave/bravebot/main/install.sh | sh

That puts the binary in /usr/local/bin, and takes INSTALL_DIR for somewhere else:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brave/bravebot/main/install.sh | INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.local/bin" sh

Or on Windows, in PowerShell, without Node:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brave/bravebot/main/install.ps1 | iex

That puts bravebot.exe in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\bravebot, takes INSTALL_DIR for somewhere else, and adds the directory to your user PATH unless BRAVEBOT_NO_MODIFY_PATH is set.

Either way, run bravebot in a repository afterwards. The installers verify the release checksum and the signature on the binary (see "Check a download by hand" on the install page), and a session started on an old version says so and gives the line that updates it. See docs/getting-started.md for installing, running, and what it asks you.

The documentation site at brave.github.io/bravebot covers the same ground for somebody using bravebot rather than working on it, and is maintained in-tree under docs/website.

How it works

Before data is processed it is labelled as trusted or untrusted and as public or private. An example of untrusted content is text from a web page. An example of private data is a project's secrets. Brave Bot can work with untrusted and private content, but it never lets that content into its planner's context. Processors are used to work on immutable untrusted content. A processor is a sub-agent with no tools, no memory and no conversation. It can read untrusted content and rewrite it, but nothing it produces can direct what happens next. One or more labelled data slots are passed into a processor, and it outputs at most one new immutable data slot. The planner is never influenced by untrusted context.

How Brave Bot works covers labels, quarantine and processors in full. Traces of the gates running are in docs/specs/.

Plan first, then execute

The default decides each step after the last one has run. --mode manifest plans the whole run before anything is read, asks you to approve the plan, and then runs the steps with nothing re-planned:

bravebot --mode manifest "collect every TODO comment into notes/todos.md"

In a session, /manifest <task> does the same for one task. A plan is put to you first says what the approval covers.

Specs

Behaviour is specified clause by clause, and each clause names the tests that pin it. See docs/specs/.

Data collection, usage, and retention

We do not use your data and we do not store it. Prompts and used file contents are sent to Brave's endpoint to produce a reply and are discarded once it has been produced. Nothing is retained and nothing is used for training. Local settings are stored in ~/.bravebot on your own machine.

That describes Brave's endpoint. If you configure another provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock or a gateway), your prompts and file contents go to that provider instead, and its terms govern what it retains and whether it trains on them. A model server on your own machine, such as Ollama, keeps them on your machine.

If bravebot panics, the next launch sends a crash report to Brave's Backtrace project. A report holds the version, the operating system and architecture, how bravebot was installed, and the source file, line and column of the panic. It never holds your prompts, file contents, credentials or paths on your machine, or anything a model or a server said, and nothing in it is the same from one report to the next. The service sees the network address the report came from, as any server does. Reports are on in released builds. Set BRAVEBOT_CRASH_REPORTS=0, or "crashReports": false in ~/.bravebot/settings.json, to stop them. A build from source sends nothing unless it was built with a submission address. See docs/specs/crash-reports.md for what a report may hold.

bravebot --incognito runs a session that adds nothing to ~/.bravebot: no prompt history, no session record, no audit trail, and no change to the model or theme you have chosen. It still reads all of that, so the session is the one you configured rather than a fresh install. It edits your project as usual, since that is the work rather than a trace of it. See Incognito sessions for what it covers and what it does not, and docs/specs/incognito.md for the clauses.

Reporting a Vulnerability

See https://hackerone.com/brave for details, and SECURITY.md for the versions that are supported.

Development

cargo build and make check, which runs fmt, clippy and the tests. See docs/development/ for checks, commits, cross-builds, configuration and releasing, and docs/best_practices.md for what a pull request is reviewed against.

For the .envrc configuration, message bbondy.

Credit

docs/credit.md.

License

MPL-2.0