AI Browsers Are Coming and They’re Hungry for Context

The web’s getting a reboot. The last one was Chrome. The next one is an AI with a clipboard.

Legacy browsers were just glass. They showed you pages and got out of the way. The new ones want a chat. OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia don’t just load sites, they understand them, summarise them, and act on them. You can ask them to plan your trip, find quotes, book a flight, or compare suppliers, and they’ll do it faster than you could type “best options.”

This isn’t a cosmetic upgrade. It’s a land grab. Chrome, Safari, Edge, they’re old-school rendering engines. These newcomers are workflow orchestrators. Their job isn’t to wait for you to click. It’s to quietly do things for you.

For OpenAI, it’s not about convenience, it’s survival. ChatGPT has more than 800 million users and burns through money like a dying star. A browser gives them the one thing they don’t have: ownership of the gateway itself. Whoever owns the gateway owns the data. And whoever owns the data, owns the future models.

Autonomy for Context

The deal’s changed. Chrome traded speed for your data. AI browsers trade autonomy for your context. You get automation, they get you, your searches, your tabs, your clicks, your reading habits, even your phrasing. Every scroll and stumble feeds their models. The browser stops being a window and becomes a training lab.

Perplexity tried charging two hundred dollars a month for Comet, then quickly dropped the price to free. They realised the real currency wasn’t subscriptions, it was user behaviour. Data is the new rent.

The losers are, once again, publishers. AI Overviews and in-browser summaries have already ripped a hole in referral traffic. Some report affiliate income down by 40 per cent and page views cut in half. The web’s old link economy is collapsing, replaced by an answer economy where the browser tells you what you need to know without sending you anywhere. Writers and newsrooms are being demoted from destinations to data feedstock. Your article becomes raw material for someone else’s summary.

So far, only a few companies have cottoned on. Perplexity now talks about paying publishers through a revenue-share model, while most others quietly mine content and move on. The shift is already rewriting SEO. Keywords don’t matter. Structured data does. Write for the machine, not the human.

Privacy, meanwhile, is being repackaged as a lifestyle choice. AI browsers need to see everything you do, every cookie, click, and comment, to function. Perplexity trains on that data by default unless you opt out, which most people never will. OpenAI’s Atlas at least pretends to play safe by keeping users opted out of training, though it still collects the full browsing context. Brave Leo takes the monk’s route: no tracking, no training, everything handled locally. You can almost hear it tutting at the rest of the industry.

It all comes down to the privacy calculus. The more useful the agent, the more of yourself you have to hand over. Everyone says they care about privacy, right up until it gets in the way of convenience. Then they click “agree” and move on.

The Insider Threat in Your Tabs

When your browser can log into accounts and move between apps, it becomes a high-value insider threat. The newest party trick is called Prompt Injection, where a malicious site hides secret instructions in its code. The AI reads them and does what it’s told, leaks data, transfers money, deletes files, all with your login credentials. To your system, it still looks like you. The industry hasn’t yet figured out how to tell the difference.

The economics behind all this are brutal. These systems cost a fortune to run. Subscriptions soften the blow but the real money, as always, lies in advertising. The kind that doesn’t feel like advertising. OpenAI’s ad hires suggest exactly that, contextual suggestions delivered mid-conversation, not banner clutter.

Reliability will decide who wins. Chrome won because it was fast. The next winner will win because it’s trustworthy. The one that can perform complex tasks flawlessly without leaking your secrets. The rest will vanish the moment an agent accidentally books someone’s honeymoon in the wrong country.

Google’s dominance has never looked shakier. This isn’t about faster loading times any more. It’s about who you trust to make decisions on your behalf. If they get it right, we’ll hand them the keys to the web. If they get it wrong, regulators will take them away.

The browser was once our window to the world. AI has turned it into a mirror. It studies what we read, how long we linger, and what we ignore. For now, it feels like help. But give it a few years and we’ll realise we didn’t just outsource our clicks, we outsourced our curiosity.