During a livestream on Tuesday, OpenAI introduced its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas. Other AI browsers on the market include Dia from The Browser Company, Opera’s Neon, Perplexity’s Comet, and Strawberry, which is supported by General Catalyst. What sets OpenAI’s release apart is its potential reach, as it could be accessed by up to 800 million weekly ChatGPT users. For OpenAI, the main goal of the browser is to keep ChatGPT at the forefront, rather than simply improving web browsing.
Atlas is currently only available for Mac users, but OpenAI is already developing versions for Windows, iOS, and Android—platforms where ChatGPT is already present. Unlike competitors that use invitation systems, OpenAI has made Atlas accessible to everyone. The browser’s main idea is to position ChatGPT as your primary tool for searching and finding answers, taking the place of Google as your first stop.
All AI browsers share a common vision for search and Q&A: instead of entering a search query and browsing through pages of links, you type your question in the address bar and receive answers directly from an AI chatbot.
OpenAI, like other browser developers, believes Atlas will transform how people use the internet. At the launch, Sam Altman emphasized, “We believe AI offers a rare chance to reimagine what a browser can do, how we interact with it, and how we can make the most of the web. Tabs were a great innovation, but there hasn’t been much progress since then.”
Industry leaders such as Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella have described AI as a major platform shift. Yet for most users, mobile devices and desktop operating systems remain the main gateways to AI tools. OpenAI aims to control as much of ChatGPT’s distribution as possible. Recently, Meta blocked third-party chatbots, including ChatGPT and Perplexity, from WhatsApp, which has over 3 billion monthly users. This highlights how platform owners can restrict access at any time.
Atlas also gives OpenAI the chance to more deeply weave ChatGPT and its other products together, in ways other platforms cannot. Users can reference several websites directly, rather than pasting links into ChatGPT. OpenAI already employs a headless browser for its agent, and Atlas could give it greater control over this functionality. The browser already features a floating writing assistant that appears in text fields.
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Additionally, OpenAI is working to integrate its App SDK, which allows users to access other apps within ChatGPT, making it easier to discover new tools.
The memory function is especially valuable for power users of ChatGPT. It considers both your browsing and ChatGPT histories to provide answers that are tailored to your context. For example, you could ask, “Where did I save my presentation plan?” and ChatGPT would retrieve the relevant link. The more time you spend in the browser, the more context ChatGPT gathers about you. OpenAI can leverage this information and share it with other apps as it expands the Sign in with ChatGPT feature.
Both the default ChatGPT search and the memory feature are designed to collect more user data, giving OpenAI deeper insights into user habits and supporting better product development. The browser does not include features like ad-blocking, VPN, reading mode, or translation to enhance site browsing. Instead, users are expected to ask ChatGPT to summarize or locate information on a page—suggesting that opening a page is more about giving ChatGPT context than helping users read the content directly.
By comparison, Arc from The Browser Company introduces helpful features to improve browsing, such as using AI to rename downloaded files or letting users remove elements from a web page for customization.
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Ultimately, Atlas is more than just a browser—it serves as a broader platform for ChatGPT. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s applications CEO, explained this vision in her blog post about Atlas’s debut.
“When we first launched ChatGPT, we didn’t know exactly how people would use it. Now, after receiving feedback from hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it’s obvious that ChatGPT needs to become much more than the simple chatbot it started as. We envision ChatGPT evolving into the operating system for your life—a fully connected center that helps you organize your day and accomplish your long-term objectives,” Simo wrote.
The main challenge for OpenAI is convincing users who default to Chrome, Safari, or Edge to switch to its browser and take some market share from Google, Apple, and Microsoft. While ChatGPT’s user base continues to grow, it’s uncertain whether most people are ready to merge their browsing and chatbot experiences. Chrome’s popularity stemmed from its speed and the convenience of Google search as the starting point for the web. ChatGPT Atlas is ideal for those who already use ChatGPT instead of Google, but for OpenAI to replace Chrome, it needs to encourage billions of users to adopt this new habit.
