By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Publication Date: 2026-01-26 12:01:00
Opinion Cursor, an AI integrated development environment (IDE) company, recently suggested that it had built a working web browser almost entirely using its AI agents. I won’t say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: “We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor.”
He added: “It’s more than 3 million lines of code in thousands of files. The rendering engine is built from the ground up in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text styling, color and a custom JS VM.”
That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? He also added, “It *somehow* works,” which isn’t the most convincing endorsement. Nevertheless, numerous news sources and social media chatboxes spread with the news that AI had created a web browser in a week.
Too bad it wasn’t true. If you actually looked at cursor engineer Wilson Lin’s blog post about FastRender, the AI-built web browser, you won’t find much boasting about a working web browser. Instead there is a video from a web…