OpenAI is shutting down Atlas, the AI-powered browser it launched in October with ChatGPT at its core. But it’s not about giving up the idea that AI should help people navigate the web. Instead, it’s taking some of the agent navigation features it tested in Atlas and redistributing them between the ChatGPT desktop app and a Google Chrome extension.

The decision to shut down Atlas comes a few months after OpenAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo told the team to reduce “side quests,” prompting the AI ​​company to shut down its AI video generation tool, Sora.

For much of the past year, the AI ​​industry has been engaged in a war to unseat Chrome as the place where people spend most of their time online. Perplexity launched Comet, The Browser Company launched Dia, and Google and Microsoft updated Chrome and Edge, respectively, with new AI-powered features.

After a few months of experimentation, OpenAI seems to have come to the conclusion that the browser is a feature, not the destination. So it’s integrating Atlas’ browser-like agent capabilities into the places where people already work, and that includes Chrome.

OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT extension in Chrome that gives you access to the context of the page you’re viewing, allows users to ask questions about web pages, summarize content, or start longer tasks, all from the browser. It is a direct competitor to Google’s Gemini side panel, which performs several of the same tasks.

OpenAI is also boosting its ChatGPT desktop app by introducing a more robust browser that allows users to browse websites, log into accounts, download files, and interact with web pages without leaving ChatGPT. A standalone cloud browser runs remotely on OpenAI servers as a place where application agents can complete tasks on behalf of a user.

Together, the updates turn ChatGPT into a continuous workspace that spans Chrome, the desktop app, and an AI agent.