The past couple of months have seen major moves and product introductions in the realm of AI web browsers. Anthropic released an AI agent that will live in Chrome, while Google rolled out a Gemini button for Chrome. Opera released its AI browser called Neon. Perplexity’s Comet became broadly available for free. The Browser Company’s Dia became available to all Mac users without an invite (although not Windows users). Brave – whose privacy-oriented browser now has 100M+ users – is updating its Leo AI (2023) with a more agentic experience. Perhaps most notably, OpenAI this week launched its long-awaited ChatGPT Atlas browser (MacOS), which was quickly followed by Microsoft’s release of “Copilot Mode” in its Edge browser. While it’s still early days, AI web browsers are taking their first steps to becoming the inevitable norm – if the WSJ headline “I Tried an AI Web Browser, and Now I’m a Convert” is any indication.

AI players have been circling the browser for months. As we’ve said before, the browser is a key channel to users, with visibility into a broad array of behaviors and interests. On a consumer device, there are a series of “windows” to the customer – the hardware, the operating system, the application or website, and the browser. The hardware and operating system are generally controlled by a few large players. The application/website layer is a highly competed arena with low switching costs for users. The browser, in contrast, is sticky amongst users but could be up for grabs in the new AI era. In the browser’s role as gatekeeper near the user’s intent or need, it is akin to a search engine or ecommerce platform – with the potential to be a wedge into a “super app.”

The use cases for AI that can see your browser tabs are endless – “Explain this webpage in layman’s terms.” “Is this the best price available anywhere on the web?” “Make this recipe vegetarian.” Users who are constantly switching between their browser/Google and their favorite AI chatbot will gravitate to the convenience of a single, central home for their search and ecommerce activities. The usefulness of an AI browser is highlighted by the opening lines in the aforementioned WSJ article: “I’ve been using several AI web browsers lately. I’m never going back to the boring old kind.”

Users may be hesitant to use the more agentic features – such as shopping transactions or flight/hotel booking. Significant privacy issues have been raised by industry watchers like Simon Willison, the team at privacy-oriented browser Brave, and many others. Browsers have access to extraordinarily sensitive data – including, potentially, private emails, passwords, financial information, health records, personal documents, photos, and files in cloud storage. It is data that could be extremely useful for AI agents in completing their tasks, but could also be devastating for users in the case of a breach. AI agents today can be readily manipulated using invisible prompt injections planted on websites, resulting in them taking actions that were once prevented by established Web security techniques.

Nevertheless, users who may initially be reluctant to use the agentic features may be more open to using the conventional AI-assistant features, especially if the memory can be turned off. It can be a slippery slope though, which may start with treating the browser like their favorite chatbot (except with more context drawn from the browser tabs). The convenience of having these features in one place, however, could lead to users gradually exposing more of their data to the AI chatbot.

Google’s Chrome is clearly the browser to beat here. Google has a trusted browser already used by 3.5B users worldwide, with established technology and partner ecosystems and access to 20% of all search queries in the US. Google’s dominance in search and browsers also gives it substantial leverage in the current and future AI race, especially in terms of distribution and user data. Among AI models, Gemini is currently #1 on the leaderboards in text, vision, and image-editing. The race for distribution is fundamentally the race to build the next consumer tech giant in the AI era, where the bases of competition will include personalization, relevance, trust and data security. For a user that’s already implicitly granted Google access to their email and browser – with all that extraordinarily sensitive data for context – it may be psychologically easier to stay with Google rather than trust a relative unknown.

The irony is that the vast majority of these AI browsers – including those from OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Brave – are Chromium-based browsers. Chromium is an Google-backed open-source project originally launched in 2008. As Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas put it: “Most of the things they did on reimagining tabs as processes and the way they’ve gone about security, encryption, and just the performance, the core back-end performance of Chromium as an engine, rendering engines that they have, is all really good. There’s no need to reinvent that. And at the same time, it’s an open-source project, so it’s easy to hire [developers].” On the other hand, the commoditization of the core features of the browser could mean that trust will increasingly be the deciding factor for users.

The browser market landscape is set for some major shifts. The Browser Company is being acquired by Atlassian for $610M. The existing AI players will release more features as they vie for position in the browser race. There’s also more players in the space (e.g. AI notebook Deta, agentic-browser Fellou, browser-extension Composite) than the ones mentioned above, and more on the way. Security and privacy standards will begin to emerge for agentic browsers. In California, for instance, a law was recently passed that would require browsers to make it easy for users to opt out of allowing the sale of their data. And in the meantime, there will be growing interest in the other end of the product spectrum – minimalist browsers with zero AI.

Aug 29 2025 (3 Shifts): AI players circle the browser

Sep 19 2025 (3 Shifts): Google’s Gemini edges ahead