OpenAI is sunset Atlas, the AI-powered browser launched in October with ChatGPT at its core. But we’re not giving up on the idea that artificial intelligence should help people navigate the web. Instead, it takes some of the browsing features it tested in Atlas and redistributes them to ChatGPT’s desktop app and a Google Chrome extension.
The move to shut down Atlas comes just months after former OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo told the team to reduce “side quests”, which led the AI company to shut down its AI video production tool Sora.
For much of the past year, the AI industry has been engaged in a war to topple Chrome as the place where people spend most of their time online. Perplexity released Comet, The Browser Company released Dia, and Google and Microsoft have updated Chrome and Edge, respectively, with new AI-powered features.
After a few months of experimentation, OpenAI seems to have concluded that the browser is a feature, not the destination. So it’s folding Atlas’ browser-like agent capabilities into the places people already work — and that includes Chrome.
OpenAI releases a ChatGPT Chrome extension that gives it access to the context of the page you’re viewing, allowing users to ask questions about web pages, summarize content, or start larger tasks from within the browser. It is a direct competitor to Google’s Gemini Side Panel, which performs many of the same tasks.
OpenAI also enhances the ChatGPT desktop application with a more powerful browser that allows users to browse websites, sign in to accounts, download files and interact with websites without leaving ChatGPT. A separate cloud browser runs remotely on OpenAI’s servers as a place where application agents can complete tasks on behalf of a user.
Together, the updates turn ChatGPT into a continuous workspace spanning Chrome, the desktop app, and an AI agent.
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