I know a lot of people want to celebrate any stumble OpenAI makes, and rightfully so, but the imminent “death” of its Atlas browser isn’t a sign of a company retreating from a competitive market. If you didn’t catch the news yesterday, OpenAI announced, as part of the release of ChatGPT Work, that it would deprecate Atlas on August 9. Coverage of the news treated it like OpenAI was giving up on the browser space entirely, with headlines like “The ChatGPT browser is already dead” and “OpenAI is shutting down the ChatGPT Atlas browser only months after its release” making the rounds.
Naturally, people on social media followed suit. For instance, one Bluesky user Pavel took it as an opportunity to round up a number of other “dead” OpenAI initiatives. “Tell me again about ‘inevitability,'” they added. Setting aside some of the other inclusions don’t quite fit, like the IPO plans OpenAI reportedly delayed in June, it’s not accurate to include Atlas in that list.
Sora: dead
Atlas: dead
“adult mode”: dead
Abilene expansion: dead
OpenAI IPO: deadTell me again about “inevitability”
We’ve known since March OpenAI has been working on a so-called “super app” that would bring together ChatGPT, its Codex coding agent and Atlas browser under one roof. On Thursday, that effort arrived in the form of a redesigned ChatGPT desktop app. As expected, it allows users to converse with ChatGPT, delegate tasks to Codex and ChatGPT Work (OpenAI’s new general purpose productivity agent) and surf the web through a built-in browser. You can access the browser through a shortcut on the top right of the interface, or by pressing Ctrl, Alt and B at the same time.
True, what’s here isn’t a one-for-one replacement for Atlas, but that’s because OpenAI has effectively split the app across two different products. In addition to ChatGPT Work, the company also announced an update to its Chrome extension. The plugin now functions like a direct competitor to Google’s own Gemini in Chrome. After you grant OpenAI permission to gather context from the page you’re viewing, you can ask ChatGPT questions about the content and start longer tasks from its prompt bar. Back in the ChatGPT app, a new feature called Sites allows the chatbot to generate web apps for your own personal use. “Sites are useful when you want to create things like live dashboards, project trackers, launch calendars, prototypes, internal portals, and interactive reports,” OpenAI said yesterday.
So, yes, Atlas is going away, but it’s not like it’s leaving behind a void. In reporting about the discontinuation, a handful of publications referenced guidance former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo gave employees in March, telling them the company had to avoid becoming distracted by “side quests.” Based on what we saw from OpenAI this week, I don’t think the company came to the conclusion Atlas was a distraction. Instead, like TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan, I would argue the company decided that “the browser is a feature, not the destination.”
Writing about the decision to discontinue Atlas, OpenAI’s James Sun suggested as much. “All these capabilities were built on what we learned from Atlas users who took a leap of faith on a new browser,” he said of ChatGPT’s new browsing features. “You taught us how agents can help make browsing and doing work on the open web better, and we are applying these learnings to these new products.”
Again, I know a lot of people want to see OpenAI fail, and I think we can and should resist the notion that AI will inevitably run the world. Despite those feelings, the end of Atlas doesn’t really feel like a failure; it’s more a change in strategy. Knowing this company, it will make bigger mistakes that are more worthy of criticism and ridicule.
