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

OpenAI is shutting down Atlas, the AI-powered browser it launched in October with ChatGPT at its core. But she’s not abandoning the idea that AI should help people surf the web. Instead, it takes some of the proxy browsing features I experienced in Atlas and redistributes them via the ChatGPT desktop app and a Google Chrome extension.

The move to shut down Atlas comes just months after Fidji Simo, chief applications officer at OpenAI, asked the team to cut back on “side tasks,” which led to the AI ​​company shutting down its AI video generation tool Sora.

For much of the past year, the AI ​​industry has 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 updated Chrome and Edge, respectively, with new AI-powered features.

After a few months of experimentation, OpenAI seems to have figured out that the browser is a feature, not a destination. So, Atlas’s browser-like agent capabilities are being integrated into the places where 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, letting 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 many of the same tasks.

OpenAI is also enhancing the ChatGPT desktop app by offering a more powerful 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 application agents can complete tasks on behalf of the user.

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