AI: Anthropic joins AI Browser Race. RTZ #827

I’ve been discussing ‘AI Browsers’, for a while now. It’s the next major area for LLM AI companies to take their core products, into our web browsers. Both on our computers and phones. The move is logical given that a ‘browser’ app is the single core ‘application’ used by billions of people to do anything on the internet.

That AI technologies can help do some of those things for us is a given in the next phase of this AI Tech Wave. Both via text and voice, AI can help reason through our daily work and personal online habits and provide proactive help in a whole host of ways. All the buzzwords like ‘AI Reasoning’ and ‘AI Agents’ come into play.

The two major global web browsers are of course Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari, with most of the global browser market together. Microsoft’s Edge and a whole host of other browsers together make up low single digits of the 4 billion plus browsers in use daily. They’re all likely going to be ‘AI enabled’ in the coming months. Especially with the coming ‘Remedies’ phase of Google’s legal trial over Chrome.

The new AI ‘startups’ like Perplexity, The Browser Company, and others are already testing AI browsers, with OpenAI in particular likely launching one shortly. And of course whatever Apple decides to do in this space.

So it isn’t a surprise that Anthropic is focusing on this area as well. Especially as all these companies lean into ‘Scaling AI’ into new areas.

As TechCrunch reports, “Anthropic launches a Claude AI Agent that lives in Chrome”:

“Anthropic is launching a research preview of a browser-based AI agent powered by its Claude AI models, the company announced on Tuesday. The agent, Claude for Chrome, is rolling out to a group of 1,000 subscribers on Anthropic’s Max plan, which costs between $100 and $200 per month. The company is also opening a waitlist for other interested users.”

Note that Anthropic is not launching a browser per se, but a Chrome software extension. It’s a relatively easier ramp into ‘AI Browsing’.

“By adding an extension to Chrome, select users can now chat with Claude in a sidecar window that maintains context of everything happening in their browser. Users can also give the Claude agent permission to take actions in their browser and complete some tasks on their behalf.”

The piece then goes on to lay out the reason for these next steps, given the coming entry of OpenAI vs Google Chrome:

“The browser is quickly becoming the next battleground for AI labs, which aim to use browser integrations to offer more seamless connections between AI systems and their users. Perplexity recently launched its own browser, Comet, which features an AI agent that can offload tasks for users. OpenAI is reportedly close to launching its own AI-powered browser, which is rumored to have similar features to Comet. Meanwhile, Google has launched Gemini integrations with Chrome in recent months.”

And Google’s antitrust case is also a factor in these developments:

“The race to develop AI-powered browsers is especially pressing given Google’s looming antitrust case, in which a final decision is expected any day now. The federal judge in the case has suggested he may force Google to sell its Chrome browser. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for Chrome, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested his company would be willing to buy it as well.”

Of course Anthropic, given its history on AI Safety, is highlighting the care needed in this next evolution of AI into our daily applications. Through a whole range of web browsers globally:

“In the Tuesday blog post, Anthropic warned that the rise of AI agents with browser access poses new safety risks. Last week, Brave’s security team said it found that Comet’s browser agent could be vulnerable to indirect prompt-injection attacks, where hidden code on a website could trick the agent into executing malicious instructions when it processed the page.”

“(Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, told TechCrunch in an email that the vulnerability Brave raised has been fixed.)”

And signallng that these are preliminary steps into this arena of AI activity:

“Anthropic says it hopes to use this research preview as a chance to catch and address novel safety risks; however, the company has already introduced several defenses against prompt injection attacks. The company says its interventions reduced the success rate of prompt injection attacks from 23.6% to 11.2%.”

“For example, Anthropic says users can limit Claude’s browser agent from accessing certain sites in the app’s settings, and the company has, by default, blocked Claude from accessing websites that offer financial services, adult content, and pirated content. The company also says that Claude’s browser agent will ask for user permission before “taking high-risk actions like publishing, purchasing, or sharing personal data.”

“This isn’t Anthropic’s first foray into AI models that can control your computer screen. In October 2024, the company launched an AI agent that could control your PC — however, testing at the time revealed that the model was quite slow and unreliable.”

What we are seeing are but ‘baby steps’ in this direction:

“The capabilities of agentic AI models have improved quite a bit since then. TechCrunch has found that modern browser-using AI agents, such as Comet and ChatGPT Agent, are fairly reliable at offloading simple tasks for users. However, many of these agentic systems still struggle with more complex problems.”

This Fall should see some bigger steps by the main companies in blending AI technologies into our browsing applications.

Also important of course is how websites in general rework their sites for AI as well, a topic I discussed just a few days ago on the transition from ‘SEO’ to ‘GEO”. Optimizing the internet for AI rather than just Search.

We are going beyond the first steps of AI chatbots in this AI Tech Wave. And a lot of things are going to be figured out as companies large and small take these next critical steps into ‘AI Browsing’. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)