OpenAI Is About to Release an AI Web Browser

OpenAI is on the verge of releasing its own AI-powered web browser, Reuters reports.

Expected to launch in the coming weeks, the browser is being released with audacious ambitions. Per the reporting, it's meant to challenge Google Chrome's broad market dominance, with nearly two-thirds of internet users favoring the web browser, or about three billion people.

That won't be easy, needless to say. But OpenAI has the prerequisites to at least put a sizable dent in Google's monopoly. Namely, the over 500 million weekly active users of ChatGPT — 20 million of whom are loyal, paying subscribers. 

You may note the large disparity between paid users and total users here, which suggests that OpenAI's product doesn't command the sort of loyalty — or inspire the excitement — that would have users follow it down whatever new venture it throws out there. Nonetheless, there's no denying it boasts an enormous pool of users on whom to potentially capitalize.

And what would OpenAI be capitalizing on by releasing a (presumably) free web browser, you may ask? It appears that CEO Sam "Altruism" Altman has an ulterior motive in mind with the product. We'll let the Reuters reporting spell it out. "It will give OpenAI more direct access to a cornerstone of Google's success: user data."

More data means OpenAI could serve you more and better targeted ads, which translates to more money. Which speaks to another way OpenAI was already hurting Google: taking away search ad revenue as more people have come to depend on ChatGPT to get all their answers.

Getting your data was such a big concern for OpenAI, in fact, that it decided against going the easier route of integrating ChatGPT into an existing browser, according to a Reuters source. By building its own browser, it would have more control over the data it could collect.

Other details are scant. The browser is reportedly built on Google's open source Chromium platform, which undergirds many popular browsers including Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and of course, Google Chrome.

The reporting also suggests that OpenAI's product is designed "to keep some user interactions within a ChatGPT-like native chat interface instead of clicking through to websites."

The browser could streamline compatibility with OpenAI's AI agent, Operator, which is designed to take over a user's desktop and perform virtual tasks including those using a web browser, like shopping online. By having access to your data, the AI agent would know what sites to use for tasks like booking reservations.

This has long been in the making for OpenAI. As Reuters noted, the company hired two Google executives who developed Google Chrome. In April, an OpenAI exec testified that the company was interested in buying Google Chrome if Google was forced to divest the browser as part of a massive antitrust ruling.

As fast as OpenAI is moving, several of its competitors have beaten it to the punch. Earlier this week, the Nvidia-backed AI startup Perplexity released its own Chromium browser called Comet, with integrated agentic AI capabilities and its chatbot as the default search engine. Right now, it's available only to subscribers who pay $200 per month (a ludicrous subscription tier that OpenAI also shares).

But OpenAI is already a household name in the space. Expect it to make a bigger splash.

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