OpenAI’s next step in its fight against Google is an AI-powered web browser. A tool called ChatGPT Atlas is available today. The company announced it in a livestream on Tuesday after teasing it with a mystery Video Browser tab on white screen.
ChatGPIT Atlas is available “globally” on macOS starting today, while access for Windows, iOS, and Android is “coming soon,” according to the company. But its “Agent Mode” is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the livestream.
“We expect people to use the Internet in the future… the chat experience in a web browser can be a great analog,” Altman said.
In addition to Altman, the livestream also included OpenAI employee Will Ellsworth, who works on post-training research; Adam Fry, head of product at ChatGPIT Search; Ben Goodger, a staff member who in previous roles helped develop Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox; Ryan O’Rouke, an interface designer; Justin Rushing, who previously worked at Apple; And Pranav Vishnu.
Fry said one of the best features of the browser is Memories – which makes the browser “more personalized and more useful to you”, as well as an agent mode, which means that “in Atlas, ChatGPT can now take actions for you… It can help you book reservations or flights or even edit the document you’re working on.” Users can view and manage the browser’s “memories,” as well as open incognito windows, in Settings, the staff said.
The browser’s Agent mode is clearly based on OpenAI’s previous efforts in agentic AI, such as its Operator Tool, an early version of a tool that allowed ChatGPT to use a computer on a user’s behalf, and ChatGPT Agent, the next iteration, which was designed to be able to complete more complex tasks, purchases, and more (though it wasn’t always successful in that area).
Whenever you click a link from a search result in Atlas, it will by default show a split-screen with the webpage and the ChatGPT transcript, with the goal of having a “companion” displayed at all times, the staff said, though a user can turn off the split-screen if they prefer. On the livestream, employees also demonstrated the browser’s summary features for webpages, as well as selecting text from an email and clicking a button to have ChatGPT organize sentences in-line – the latter feature is called “cursor chat”.
“It’s absolutely a great browser – it’s intuitive, it’s fast, it’s really nice to use,” Altman said.
The AI browser wars have been heating up for a while now – OpenAI announced a prototype of its search engine, SearchGPT dubbedExactly in July 2024. But in recent months, AI-fueled browsers have felt like the latest frontier in AI hype.
This summer, Perplexity launched its Buzzy Comet browser, an AI-powered solution that aims to simplify the way people browse the web and complete tasks. Instead of a long list of Google search results, you get a Perplexity “answer engine”, which provides a few links to relevant websites and generates an answer to your query. It can scan all your open tabs, summarize videos, de-clutter your email inbox and even make purchases on Amazon.
In September, Google announced it would embed its Gemini AI assistant more deeply into Chrome, and in the coming months, it plans to enable Gemini in Chrome to do “hard work” on your behalf, like grocery shopping, scheduling appointments, book reservations, and more — though Google declined to specify a launch date.
