The News

After The Browser Company's Dia, Perplexity's Comet, and others, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered browser that actively fights against the web.

On Tuesday, October 21, OpenAI announced the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, which should mark a major step in the company's quest to unseat Google as the main way to search the internet and find the information they are looking for online. ChatGPT Atlas rolls out on macOS first, with support for Windows, iOS, and Android following soon.

My Thoughts

I could not care less about agentic browsing. I do not get why people feel the need to tell a browser through a chat interface to book a flight for them or summarize pages (when the joyful thing is actually spending time on a website, scroll, and read through it) or gathers important links for me (because when they were important to me in the first place, I should just safe them somewhere, right?). As part of my research I read post like Some Thoughts on ChatGPT Atlas by M.G. Siegler in which he states:

... it's undoubtedly a good thing when it comes to getting people to actually use these new browsers – and, just as important, to ensure that the web actually fully works on them ...

Why is ist a good thing that people use those anti-browsers which are the outmost privacy hellholes? Why is it a good thing that people use browsers which are a huge threat against the internet? Why would I use a browser which substitutes its own AI-generated content for the actual web?

What I observed regarding AI and all its hype touches on several concepts in technology adoption, ethics, and societal trends. There is a certain over-enthusiam involved, as well as inflated expectations that often surround such new technologies before people even get a more realistic understanding of their limitations and risks set in. What Gartner coined as the Technological Hype Cycle perfectly describes why many people adopt technologies during the "peak of inflated expectations" without fully understanding the downsides. Besides that, there is a huge privacy neglect or privacy paradox going on. When it comes to AI chats and AI browsers, I see a tendency of users who ignore privacy risks when adopting new technologies, even if they express concern about privacy in general.

Those people often prioritize convenience or novelty over thorough due diligence. And this is mind-boggling to me.

Another fascinating observation is the cognitive bias individuals as well as companies have, as they overestimate the benefits of AI and those AI browsers, and underestimate the risks, which ultimately leads to uncritical adoption. And related to that, I do not understand the bandwagon effect of people adopting AI and AI browsers simple because "everyone else is using it", as this yet again leads to not assessing the risks or alternatives. Whenever I ask those people for a more concrete and sense-making explanation, I mostly hear comments like "I do not want to get left behind", which again makes no sense to me. I do not want to dive too deep into the why here, since I could probably write a whole post about it, but the short version is no one gets left behind, and in fact, it is a good thing to be late, since if you jump into new technologies right away, without assessing them, chances are high that you are learning the wrong thing as technologies will change and adapt fast.

OpenAI optimized all their products for Surveillance Capitalism, as their goal is to collect and exploit user data, and seeing all the people immediately starting to use any product OpenAI is releasing, like its new ChatGPT Atlas browser, they do not fully understand the extent of data collection or its implications. OpenAI does not care about AI ethics. OpenAI does not care about transparency, accountability, or alignment with societal values, they only care about profit, money, and getting investments to support their maniacal endeavors. And in the next 12 months they need $400 billion in order to continue like that.

The hype around AI-powered browsers like ChatGPT Atlas is disproportionate to its actual, responsible, and equitable deployment. At the same time, this reflects the AI Hype Bubble, the current enthusiasm for AI.

What ChatGPT Atlas, and in fact all those AI browsers out there get wrong, is that there is too little investment in the web as a platform. Instead, they are simple routing the web experience through a specific product or service offering. And this turns them into anti-web browsers, they become a threat for the web.

We need more folks like Anil Dash, Edward Zitron, Stephanie Stimac, Zack Whittaker pointing out all the flaws, issues, risk that come with AI browsers, because too many people are busy embracing that they can now "browse the web" through a chat interface, believing they just increased their productivity, saved time, or whatever. And again, they are embracing those things over glaring at all the security risks that come with AI browser agents. Just based on the fact that AI browsers are a hot mess of security risks should be enough to take a step back and evaluate those risks, but instead people are neglecting those risk, and instead embracing the illusion of a productivity boost.

To wrap it up with Anil Dash's words:

... Atlas is a browser that actively fights against the web, and in doing so, it's fighting against the very idea that you should have control over what you see, where you go, and what watches you while you're there.

Conclusion

The web deserves better than AI's hollow promises.

The rush to embrace AI powered browsers like ChatGPT Atlas is not just another tech trend. It is a surrender. A surrender to the illusion of convenience, to the hype machine, and to the relentless push of surveillance capitalism. These so called "browsers" are not just reimagining how we access the web. They are actively undermining it. They replace the richness of the open web with AI generated summaries, the joy of discovery with algorithmic predictions, and the autonomy of exploration with the cold efficiency of a chatbot. And for what? To save a few seconds? To avoid the "burden" of reading, scrolling, or thinking for ourselves?

What is most troubling is not just the technology itself. It is the uncritical enthusiasm with which people are adopting it. The privacy paradox, the bandwagon effect, the techno optimism bias. All of these are symptoms of a deeper issue: a willingness to trade control, transparency, and even basic common sense for the sake of novelty. The web was built on the idea of openness, of user agency, of the ability to go where you want, see what you want, and share what you want without a corporate middleman dictating the terms. AI browsers like Atlas do not just ignore these principles. They actively work against them.

And let us not forget the elephant in the room: OpenAI does not care about you, your privacy, or the future of the web. Their goal is to hoover up as much data as possible, to feed the insatiable machine of surveillance capitalism, and to keep the investment dollars rolling in.

They are not in the business of building tools that empower users. They are in the business of building tools that empower themselves. The fact that so many people are willing to hand over their browsing habits, their searches, their preferences without so much as a second thought is not just naive. It is dangerous.

The web deserves better. It deserves tools that respect its foundations, that prioritize user control, and that do not treat the open internet as a resource to be strip mined for profit. It deserves critics like Anil Dash, Edward Zitron, Stephanie Stimac, and Zack Whittaker. Voices who are not afraid to call out the flaws, the risks, and the outright deceptions of these AI powered "innovations." Because if we do not push back now, if we do not demand better, we are not just risking our own privacy or security. We are risking the very idea of the web as a place that belongs to all of us.

So no, I do not care about agentic browsing. I do not care about chatting with a browser to book a flight or summarize a page. I care about a web that is open, that is mine, and that is not being hijacked by companies that see users as nothing more than data points to be exploited. The next time you are tempted to jump on the latest AI browser bandwagon, ask yourself: Who does this really serve? Because right now, the answer is not you.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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