OpenAI has launched a new AI-powered web browser built around its flagship ChatGPT model, positioning the company in direct competition with Google and its Chrome offering, the world’s most popular browser.

Currently only available to macOS users, but with Windows, iOS, and Android access ‘coming soon’, the Atlas browser dosen’t have a URL bar, but does include a ChatGPT sidebar that the company said can summarise content, compare products, analyse data, and complete tasks across the web ‘all without copying and pasting or leaving the page’.

As if those promises aren’t already sky high, OpenAI said it has also rolled out a preview of an ‘Agent Mode’ for some paying users, with the firm making its ChatGPT Agent⁠, introduced only earlier this year, work natively within the new browser.

In one example, the firm said its browser agent could be used at work to ‘open and read through team documents, perform new competitive research, and compile insights into a brief’, though the AI agent will not be able to run code in the browser, download files, or install extensions, among other safety limitations.

“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a video introducing Atlas. “We think that AI represents a rare once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about.”

While that might sound like a potshot at Google, Atlas’s reliance on tried and trusted tabs shows that OpenAI aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. 

Instead, the focus is on personalisation, with ChatGPT’s memories function a key selling point for the new browser, which will allow it to remember key details from content users click through and ‘bring that context back’.

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According to OpenAI, this means users can ask ChatGPT questions like, “Find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends so I can prepare for interviews.” 

That level of personalisation isn’t something that Chrome, the world’s dominant browser, currently offers, despite having embedded Gemini into its offering last month. That could help to give OpenAI an edge in competing for some of Google’s 90% search share worldwide.

Launching Atlas has already made a dent in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which closed around 2.4% down on Tuesday after OpenAI’s announcement.