OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is now said to be working on its own web browser, designed to compete with Google’s Chrome, the current market leader, while using the same underlying Chromium open-source codebase. The browser would enable AI agent integrations with OpenAI’s Operator, letting it carry out actions and tasks on your behalf.
The fact that it will have access to your browsing history apparently makes it ideal for AI agents, which would book things on your behalf, fill out forms, that sort of thing, directly in the browser.
It is allegedly “designed to keep some user interactions within a ChatGPT-like native chat interface instead of clicking through to websites”, the report claims, so perhaps you’ll need to ask a chatbot for whatever site you want to go to? We’re not sure.
Disturbingly, the report also says this is “part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to capture data on users’ web behavior”, but in this day and age most people probably won’t have an issue with how that sounds. In fact, one source said OpenAI decided to build its own browser rather than an extension for existing ones “in order to have more control over the data it can collect”.
The OpenAI browser is launching “in the coming weeks”, and (of course) “aims to use artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how consumers browse the web”. And it definitely seems like it will do that by having you ask a chatbot for a website instead of typing it in an address bar – truly revolutionary stuff.
