OpenAI's AI Atlas Browser Discontinued After Less Than a Year

OpenAI's James Sun announced that their agentic AI browser, Atlas, launched just last October, will be discontinued.

The Atlas browser was a fork of Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome, with ChatGPT built in.

The headlining feature is agentic browsing, meaning ChatGPT can visit webpages and perform actions on your behalf.

Atlas promises on their website that "all automation happens locally in your browser," but the actual queries to ChatGPT itself are not local. The site boldly touts "End-to-End Encrypted," however what they actually mean is "in transit and at rest," which is called transport encryption not end-to-end encryption.

This means that as you tell the AI to browse for you, OpenAI can see the data being sent to them, and it's stored on their servers with a key they have access to.

The browser won't even let you use it unless you log in to your OpenAI account.

Vulnerabilities plagued Atlas for its short lifespan.

The cybersecurity research and consulting firm Trail of Bits described how agentic browsers resurface old browser vulnerabilities in a new form:

With browser-embedded AI agents, we’re essentially starting the security journey over again. We exploited a lack of isolation mechanisms in multiple agentic browsers to perform attacks ranging from the dissemination of false information to cross-site data leaks. These attacks, which are functionally similar to cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF), resurface decades-old patterns of vulnerabilities that the web security community spent years building effective defenses against.

The fundamental security issue with AI is that it can't distinguish between data and instructions. Malicious input could potentially rewrite its instructions at any time.

Trail of Bits concluded that significant work needed to be done to isolate and secure agentic browsers.

As a replacement for Atlas, OpenAI's new all-encompassing ChatGPT app will include a built-in agentic browser and Codex all in one.

The app can autonomously browse the web as well as access your local files and apps.

There's also a "cloud browser" that "runs remotely and handles delegated web tasks," likely meaning that OpenAI will have direct access to the browsing that happens inside.

There's also now a Chrome extension if you want to turn Chrome into an agentic ChatGPT browser, and send your browsing data to OpenAI.