OpenAI is shutting down Atlas - the AI browser it launched only in October, with ChatGPT at its core. But the company is not giving up on the idea that AI should help you while you surf; instead, it is taking the features it tested in Atlas and moving them to where people already work - into the ChatGPT desktop app and into an extension for Google Chrome.

The shutdown comes a few months after apps chief executive Fidji Simo told the team to cut back on "side quests" - a directive that previously killed the Sora video-generation tool as well. In other words, OpenAI discovered that the browser is a feature, not a destination. So instead of building a new home, it is moving into someone else's - and literally into Chrome, the house of its biggest rival.

Over the past year the whole AI industry has been at war to knock Chrome off its throne as the place where people spend the most time online. Perplexity launched Comet, The Browser Company launched Dia, and Google and Microsoft added their own AI features to Chrome and Edge. After a few months of experimenting, OpenAI seems to have concluded that this war is not worth it - better to nest inside the user's habits than to force them to change one.

The new Chrome extension gives ChatGPT access to the content of the page you are viewing - you can ask questions, get a summary or start a longer task, straight from the browser. It is a direct rival to Google's Gemini Side Panel, which does similar things. In parallel, the desktop app gets a stronger built-in browser where you can open sites, log in and download files without leaving ChatGPT, while a separate cloud browser runs on OpenAI's servers for tasks the agent completes on your behalf. The result: ChatGPT wants to be a constant workspace stretching across Chrome, the desktop and the AI agent - and once again, the road there runs through Google's house.