Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone. Others will be private, “Mozilla-hosted cloud options,” he says. And, yes, some will be from the big companies in the space — Enzor-DeMeo didn’t name Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT, but it’s not hard to guess.

Enzor-DeMeo has been at Mozilla for almost exactly a year. Until now, he’s been leading the team building Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which, in so many ways, is the thing that makes Mozilla go. Firefox is the company’s most visible product; it’s the biggest moneymaker, thanks mostly to a deal that gives Google default search placement; and it’s the place where Mozilla gets to actually put its values to work. Enzor-DeMeo spent 2025 racing to make Firefox a more compelling product, adding things like tab groups, while also trying to figure out how the browser should integrate with AI.

As he takes over the top job, Enzor-DeMeo knows that AI is the question at hand. The rise of ChatGPT and its ilk has shaken up product markets everywhere, and the tech industry is betting that as AI takes over, people will be unusually willing to try new products. A lot of companies are even betting that the browser wars are back, after nearly two decades of everybody just using Google Chrome. Enzor-DeMeo buys the theory and says Firefox’s numbers reflect it — 200 million people use the product every month, he says, and it’s actually growing at a decent clip on mobile in particular. That’s a far cry from the four billion or so that use Chrome, but it still gives Firefox meaningful scale.

It’s no accident that the Firefox guy is taking over, by the way. “Priority one [for Mozilla] is still building the best browser,” he says. “I am very pragmatic that that is our core business, and it would take a lot to prove otherwise.” Going forward, when Mozilla launches new products, they’re likely to be tied to Firefox — Enzor-DeMeo mentions that Mozilla VPN is coming to Firefox next year, just to name one, and says there are other features in the works.

In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web.

At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

One way to solve many of these problems is to get a lot more people using Firefox. And Enzor-DeMeo is convinced Mozilla can get there, that people want what the company is selling. “There is something to be said about, when I have a Mozilla product, I always know my data is in my control. I can turn the thing off, and they’re not going to do anything sketchy. I think that is needed in the market, and that’s what I hope to do.”