OpenAI has decided to discontinue development of Atlasthe AI-powered browser presented last October with ChatGPT as central element of the experience. The company, however, does not give up on the idea of making web browsing more intelligent, choosing instead to distribute the features tested with Atlas within other existing products.
The capabilities developed for the browser will in fact be integrated into the ChatGPT desktop app and one new extension dedicated to Google Chrome. In this way, OpenAI aims to offer assisted navigation tools directly in the environments that users use every day, rather than offering a separate browser.
The decision comes a few months after Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s head of applications, urged teams to reduce projects considered secondary. Following this new strategic line, the company had already stopped the development of the AI-based video generation tool called Sora.
Learn more about OpenAI’s shutdown of Atlas
In recent months the artificial intelligence sector has invested heavily in the competition to conquer the role occupied by Google Chrome as the main access point to the web. Perplexity introduced CometThe Browser Company launched Diawhile Google and Microsoft have enriched Chrome and Edge with new AI-based features.
After a period of experimentation, OpenAI appears to have concluded that the browser does not represent the final productbut only one of the tools through which to use artificial intelligence. For this reason it decided to incorporate Atlas’s agent capabilities directly into its services.
The new ChatGPT extension for Chrome will be able to read the context of the page being viewed, answer questions about the content, create summaries and launch more complex tasks directly from the browser. This is a solution that competes with Google’s Gemini panel, which it offers similar functions. At the same time, the ChatGPT desktop app receives a more advanced browser, capable of visit websites, log in to accounts, download files and interact with pages without leaving the application.
