Surprise! OpenAI built a browser.

It’s called Atlas. It joins Perplexity’s Comet and The Browser Company’s Dia as the latest entrant in the AI browser wars. Funnily enough, Dia was acquired in a $610 million transaction that closed yesterday by the aptly named Atlassian. So now we have Atlas versus Atlassian: the titan who holds up the world versus his band of followers.

This is a move that has been long-rumored and was inevitable: There’s tremendous power in owning the browser layer. And it puts Google on notice. For two decades, Chrome plus Google Search has been the gateway to the internet. But when your browser has ChatGPT built in—with memory, agents, and task execution—why start with search? In December 2022, I wrote that browsers sit between the user and the internet, and they can see the entire process of work from start to finish—so they’re a natural place for AI to exist.

Now that the technology has caught up to its potential the question is: Who will win? Here’s your day zero hands-on Vibe Check.

What it is

OpenAI bills Atlas as a browser built around ChatGPT rather than bolted onto it. The pitch is integration at every level: a sidebar that surfaces ChatGPT on any webpage, inline writing assistance that activates in any text field across the web, and agents that can execute multi-step tasks autonomously inside your browser.

The OpenAI team told us that they’re focusing on everyday use cases for a broad range of consumers with this release, so it’s worth pointing out that Katie Parrott, our resident normie who speaks for the non-coders, got her hands on Atlas and had it shopping for Bibles within five minutes of downloading. It looks enough like a browser you’re familiar with—a search bar plus tabs for various content types, including images, videos, and news—that you won’t get lost, and it provides helpful suggestions for how to use it based on your ChatGPT usage patterns and history, so you can start executing tasks that feel relevant right away.

Memory has been a core part of ChatGPT’s product positioning since early 2024, and Atlas extends that from chat to browsing. It’s supposed to track the sites you’ve visited and actions you’ve taken, and then surface suggestions based on that context. It’s the full-on “AI as personal assistant” vision: It remembers who you are and what you do, and it can accomplish work on your behalf.

Atlas launches today for everyone—Plus, Pro, and Free tier users. Rollout starts with MacOS, with Windows and mobile to follow.

What we think

This was a high-profile cloak-and-dagger launch, so we didn’t have a ton of time to test Atlas in a comprehensive way. [Also, I (Dan) was on a plane when we got the early access email and couldn’t get it working on the plane WiFi.] We’ll have a more in-depth Vibe Check soon, but here’s what we can tell so far.

This is positioned as a tool for the general user. It’s going after Dia, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. This differentiates it from Comet by Perplexity, which feels like it’s built much more for power users.