Opera Adds AI Control Tool to Neon Browser

Most current browser-agent workflows rely on screenshots or DOM extraction to give AI tools a view of web content. The browser itself has no native integration point — no way to expose its internal state directly to an AI client. Opera is trying to change that, starting today, by building an MCP server directly into its Neon agentic browser.

MCP — Model Context Protocol — is the open standard Anthropic released in late 2024 to let AI tools connect to external services without writing custom integrations for each one. Opera's MCP Connector for Neon does something specific: it lets any MCP-compatible AI client — Claude, ChatGPT, n8n, Lovable, or OpenClaw — connect to a live Neon browser session and see what the user sees. Open tabs. Screen content. Logged-in sessions. From there the AI can navigate pages, extract information, fill out forms, capture screenshots, open new tabs, and run searches, per Opera's announcement.

The key word is "live." Existing browser-agent workflows typically rely on capturing a point-in-time view of the browser — a screenshot, a DOM dump — and sending that to the model. Opera's implementation connects to the active session, which means the AI can see the state of a logged-in session without having to authenticate independently. That is a meaningful reduction in friction for workflows that require access to authenticated contexts. Whether that access is a genuine structural improvement over third-party screen-capture tools or a proprietary convenience play depends on how many users actually pay for Neon and how well the integration holds up under varied web conditions.

The strategic logic is also clear from Opera's side. Neon launched as an agentic browser — one that could carry out tasks on a user's behalf — but the AI doing the acting was Opera's own. The MCP Connector extends that capability to any compatible external AI. If you prefer Claude for reasoning but want it to operate inside your Neon browser session, Opera is saying: fine, connect them. The browser becomes an infrastructure layer rather than a destination.

This is available to paying Neon subscribers starting today — Neon costs $19.90 per month, per TechCrunch. The feature will come to other Opera browsers in a simplified form later, per the announcement. The question for developers building browser-agent workflows is whether a first-party browser MCP server changes the calculus enough to build to Opera's specific implementation rather than a general-purpose approach that works across any browser.

What Opera is attempting is a bet that the browser — like the database before it — becomes infrastructure that AI agents query rather than operate inside through indirection. The browser companies that build native AI integration points before the ecosystem standardizes around one will have a structural advantage. Whether the bigger browsers follow with their own implementations is the next question. Opera is one of the first major browser vendors to ship native live-session MCP access — that is defensible and specific. The rest is waiting to see who moves next.