Users are only shown Big Tech “3rd-party” options. Mozilla made this choice intentionally.

Well, how many users really have LLM local-hosted?

The built-in AI staff,you referred to, is nothing but an accelerator to integrate with 3rd-party or self-hosted LLMs. It’s quite similar to choosing a search engine in settings. This feature itself is lightweight and can be disabled in settings if not required.

You may self-host SearxNG (via Docker) and avoid direct interaction with search engines - be it google, bing, Brave or DDG.

SearxNG will act as a privacy front-end for you.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It’s an add-on, not something baked-in the browser. It’s not on your property at the first place, unless you choose to install it 🙂