On Tuesday, OpenAI launched its own web browser, ‘ChatGPT Atlas”, built around its artificial intelligence (AI) model- the most widely used in the world- in a bid to supplant Google Chrome as the number one gateway to the web.

“AI represents a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink the very nature of a browser and how we use it,” said OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, during an online demonstration.

“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen much innovation since,” he argued, asserting that browsing via the search bar and URLs could now give way to a conversational, chat-like experience within a web browser.

The new browser, currently available only on Mac, integrates ChatGPT in a sidebar, allowing the generative AI to scan the page being viewed and provide contextual assistance, without the need to copy and paste between tabs.

For paying subscribers, ChatGPT Atlas also lets an AI agent take over navigation, control the cursor, and book a flight, fill in a form, or edit a document.

Most of these features are similar to those gradually being rolled out in rival browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, enhanced with the Copilot AI agent, or Comet from AI start-up Perplexity.

But the launch of ChatGPT Atlas was particularly eagerly awaited, as it is built around the world’s most popular model, with 800 million weekly users, according to OpenAI, roughly 10% of the global population.

Google rebounds

With AI models delivering broadly comparable performance for most consumer use cases, the battle to attract the largest number of users now centres on building the most popular and user-friendly interface.

“This marks another step in the race among tech companies to make their AI interface the number one portal for internet users,” said Jacob Bourne, an eMarketer analyst.

ChatGPT Atlas is available from Tuesday exclusively on Apple‘s macOS, with plans to extend to Windows and mobile (iOS and Android), said Sam Altman, without specifying a timescale.

In a sign of what is at stake, the release of a video by OpenAI, showing browser tabs two hours before the announcement, immediately triggered a drop of nearly 5% in the share price of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. But the shares rebounded shortly after OpenAI’s demonstration ended, down just 1.87% by 18:50 GMT.

In September, Alphabet won a major victory in this competition when the US courts ruled it would not be forced to sell Chrome, contrary to the US government’s position, which had sought divestment on antitrust grounds.

In August, Perplexity AI offered to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, before the courts allowed Alphabet to keep its flagship product and the advertising windfall that comes with it.

In another sign of the ongoing evolution of web browsing interfaces, several major news organisations, such as CNN and The Washington Post, or Le Figaro and Le Monde, have recently entered into paid partnerships with Perplexity to make their articles available to Comet’s paying subscribers.

Having thrown itself headlong into the AI race, OpenAI, whose estimated valuation has reached $500 billion, has in recent weeks placed orders for chips worth hundreds of billions of dollars- sums out of step with its current revenues and a source of concern for some investors.