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Sometime soon, perhaps as early as next week, OpenAI will follow up on its release of ChatGPT agent with its AI-enabled web browser.
Officially, neither OpenAI nor its usually chatty CEO, Sam Altman, has anything to say about this browser. Unofficially, it's an open secret that the company is working on one to compete not just with the already shipping AI-enabled web browsers, Perplexity Comet, and Dia, but with the 800-pound gorilla of web browsers, Google Chrome.
Why? Just look at ChatGPT agent. For all of the usual AI agent tricks in its bag, such as ordering groceries or booking meetings, it's still an external program that runs its own computer to handle "complex tasks from start to finish," with a "visual browser that interacts with the web." Behind the scenes, it leverages Operator's ability to interact with websites, Deep Research's skill in synthesizing information, and ChatGPT's intelligence and conversational fluency to deliver good answers.
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As Altman said at a May 2025 Sequoia Capital event, people use ChatGPT differently depending on age: "Older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement", while "people in their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor" and "people in college use it as an operating system." To do any of these, whether you're a Boomer, GenX, Millennial, or Generation Alpha, you use a browser.
So it makes perfect sense for OpenAI to offer a dedicated web browser. Today, most of us use our web browsers for all our work. How many tabs do you have open right now? Would you rather open another, separate program or just stay in your browser? Yeah, me too. I'd rather stay in the browser.
What to expect from OpenAI's AI browser
Therefore, what I expect the program to look like is a Chromium-based web browser -- because it's what everyone outside of Mozilla uses now -- with a fully integrated AI assistant. This will combine everything that the current assistant offers with full browser integration. So, for example, just like Comet already does, it will be able to pull data from your open tabs to give better responses to your requests.
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