Who are AI browsers for? (techcrunch.com)

OpenAI this week released ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered web browser that uses agentic models to navigate sites, perform tasks and answer queries. Early testers on the Equity podcast found only modest productivity gains: agents often “click around” to execute routine tasks (e.g., finding a recipe and adding ingredients to Instacart) rather than delivering radically new workflows, and there are unresolved security and privacy risks when models interact with third‑party sites. Other experimental AI browsers such as Comet show similar behavior, suggesting utility today is incremental rather than transformative for most users. For the AI/ML community, Atlas is significant because it advances real-world agent deployment at scale and pressures research into reliable tool use, grounding, safety and UI/UX for autonomous web interactions. The browser space has historically been unprofitable, but well‑funded AI companies like OpenAI can subsidize long development horizons, potentially reshaping search, discovery and the “open web” if more browsing is mediated by models. Key technical implications include robustness to dynamic webpages, better evaluation of agentic behavior, mitigation of information leakage and adversarial site interactions, and a need to rethink how search relevance and site owners interact with model-driven interfaces.