By Nikita Ostrovsky
Publication Date: 2025-11-13 15:26:00
“It’d be really nice to have a service that was sort of just observing your life and proactively helping you when you needed it,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a recent Q&A about OpenAI’s plans. This vision is at the heart of a new crop of AI browsers, notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet.
AI browsers differ from traditional browsers in at least two important ways. An omnipresent button in the top right corner of the screen summons a chatbot, allowing you to ask questions about the content you’re viewing—clarifying the article you’re reading, or explaining the image that you’re looking at, for example.
You can also delegate whole tasks to the AI through an agent mode, such as making changes to a Google doc or doing Amazon shopping on your behalf.
But the convenience comes at the expense of privacy. “Atlas is getting access to a lot more information than other browsers, and the information that Atlas accesses can be used to train OpenAI’s models,” says Lena Cohen, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In order to answer questions about the website that you’re visiting, AI browsers send personal details from the site for processing on their servers. Examples include order histories when you’re visiting Amazon, or messages when you’re on WhatsApp. Traditional browsers without AI features might store a list of the URLs that you visit, but they don’t see what you’re viewing on those sites.
AI browsers…
