OpenAI said Tuesday it is introducing its own web browser, Atlas, putting the ChatGPT maker in direct competition with Google as more internet users rely on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.
Creating a gateway for online search could allow OpenAI, the world's most valuable startup, to attract more Internet traffic and digital advertising revenue.
OpenAI said ChatGPT already has more than 800 million users, but many of them get it for free. The San Francisco company is losing more money than it makes and is looking for ways to turn a profit.
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OpenAI said Atlas will launch Tuesday on Apple laptops running macOS and will later appear on Microsoft's Windows operating system, Apple's iOS phone operating system and Google's Android phone system.
OpenAI's browser comes just months after one of its executives said the company would be interested in buying Google's industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge ordered its sale to prevent the abuses that have seen Google's ubiquitous search engine declared an illegal monopoly.
But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled last month rejecting the sale of Chrome sought by the U.S. Justice Department in a monopoly case, in part because he believed advances in the artificial intelligence industry were already changing the competitive landscape.
Difficult task
The OpenAI browser will face a major challenge against Chrome, which has amassed nearly three billion users worldwide and adds some artificial intelligence features from Google's Gemini technology.
The huge success of Chrome could be the basis for OpenAI when it enters the browser market. When Google released Chrome in 2008, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was so dominant that few observers believed the new browser could pose a serious threat.
But Chrome quickly won legions of fans by loading web pages faster than Internet Explorer while offering other benefits that allowed it to disrupt the market. Microsoft eventually abandoned Explorer and introduced the Edge browser, which works similarly to Chrome.
Perplexity, another small artificial intelligence startup, released its own Comet browser earlier this year. The company also expressed interest in buying Chrome and eventually submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for the browser, which stalled when Mehta decided not to break up Google.
