OpenAI has threatened to launch a browser for a while now. Yesterday morning, in one of its signature wonky livestreams, the company announced that it was finally doing just that.
The new browser, dubbed Atlas, integrates ChatGPT into every aspect of the browsing experience. It’s a direct shot at Google, which controls Chrome, the world’s most popular and most-used web browser.
OpenAI’s announcement included some subtle shade thrown on its rival.
“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the launch. To developer types who often have twenty or thirty Chrome tabs open at once, that’s clearly a thinly-veiled jab at Google.
Although the core browsing experience in Atlas still looks a lot like browsing in Chrome, there’s a key difference — rather than making AI a side feature of the browser, it’s the main focus.
In demos, OpenAI showed a sidebar appearing alongside webpages as users browse. You can enter queries into this sidebar, much as you’d enter them into a search engine. But instead of seeing traditional search results — or being sent to Google, as in Chrome — OpenAI’s ChatGPT responds to the query right in the sidebar.
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tech can also summarize webpages, or make proactive personal suggestions. If it’s the holiday season and you like to bake, for example, Atlas might proactively suggest links to gluten-free recipe pages when you open a new browser tab.
Atlas also directly integrates OpenAI’s agentic AI technology, allowing Atlas to perform tasks — like populating Instacart with your favorite grocery picks, or researching flights — for you. The agentic AI can learn your routines and help you automate them.
That’s an especially clever use of the browser tech. Agentic AI in existing systems like ChatGPT often falls flat because it needs to use special browsers embedded within a window in the ChatGPT interface. These rarely have the same capabilities as a true web browser.
By directly controlling Atlas, OpenAI’s agentic AI may suddenly be a much more useful tool.
Of course, the real reason big tech companies launch browsers isn’t to help users browse — it’s to slurp up even more data on their online behavior!
In that regard, Atlas is a powerful tool, too. OpenAI says that Atlas has “browser memories” which allow the tool to “remember key details from content you browse to improve chat responses and offer smarter suggestions — like creating a to-do list from your recent activity or continuing to research holiday gifts based on products you’ve viewed.”
This feature is optional, but if you enable it, Atlas can watch what you do online, and then proactively act on that information — even weeks later. OpenAI gives the example of a job searcher viewing multiple job listings, and then asking for a summary of the skills mentioned in the listings that they viewed over the last week.
It’s unclear if data from Browser Memories will be integrated into a user’s overall ChatGPT experience. OpenAI does say it will avoid training its models on Atlas data unless users opt in.
Atlas is a big deal. Since so much of what people do online today happens in the browser, browsers are effectively modern operating systems.
By controlling the browser experience, companies can funnel users into their own products (and away from competitors’), gather reams of data about what they do online, and quickly push new product features to them.
Atlas is currently available only on MAC OS. But that will change. Chrome may finally have some healthy competition.
