OpenAI is shutting down Atlas, but its AI browser ambitions are still growing

OpenAI is sunsetting Atlas, the AI-powered browser it launched in October with ChatGPT at its core. But it’s not giving up on the idea that AI should help people browse the web. Instead, it’s taking some of the agentic browsing features it tested in Atlas and redistributing them across ChatGPT’s desktop app and a Google Chrome extension. 

The move to shut down Atlas comes a few months after OpenAI’s CEO of applications Fidji Simo told the team to cut back on “side quests,” which led to the AI firm shutting down its AI video-generation tool Sora.

For much of the past year, the AI industry had been engaged in a war to unseat Chrome as the place where people spend most of their time online. Perplexity launched Comet, The Browser Company launched Dia, and Google and Microsoft have updated Chrome and Edge, respectively, with new AI-powered features. 

After a few months of experimenting, OpenAI appears 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 is launching a ChatGPT extension on Chrome that gives it access to the context of the page you’re viewing, lets users ask questions about web pages, summarize content, or start longer tasks all from the browser. It’s a direct competitor to Google’s Gemini Side Panel, which performs several of the same tasks. 

OpenAI is also boosting its ChatGPT desktop app by featuring a more robust browser that allows users to browse websites, log into accounts, download files, and interact with web pages without leaving ChatGPT. A separate cloud browser runs remotely on OpenAI’s servers as a place where the app’s agents can complete tasks on a user’s behalf. 

Together, the updates turn ChatGPT into a continuous workspace that spans Chrome, the desktop app, and an AI agent. 

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