Different AI companies might vary in their approaches, but they seem to agree that integrating AI into internet browsing could be a crucial next step for AI progress.
Anthropic has launched Claude for Chrome, which seemed to be a Chrome extension that integrates Claude with the Chrome browser and allows it to take actions on the user’s behalf. “We’ve developed Claude for Chrome, where Claude works directly in your browser and takes actions on your behalf,” Anthropic said on X. “We’re releasing it at first as a research preview to 1,000 users, so we can gather real-world insights on how it’s used,” Anthropic added.
Claude for Chrome appears at the top of Chrome like a browser extension. Clicking on it opens up a Claude chat on the right. In its demo, Anthropic showed a user using Claude for Chrome for finding a house on Zillow within a specified budget and other parameters, and asking for the top five options. Claude for Chrome began by taking a screenshot of the Zillow page, and then adding in the filters. Claude also asked the user for permission to read the Zillow page, and then showed the results. Anthropic also showed Claude for Chrome summarizing a Google Doc, and giving its inputs. Claude for Chrome also helped a user find a highly-rated restaurant that had garlic noodles on DoorDash. “Meet your thinking partner on any tab,” is how Anthropic is billing its new product.
It’s an interesting choice for Anthropic to build Claude as a Chrome extension. Claude is pretty well known, and it could help with quick adoption among users looking to complete agentic tasks on their browsers. But Google owns Chrome, and could likely build a similar product of its own in the coming months. As such, with model capabilities rapidly converging, Claude for Chrome might not have too much of a moat.
Perplexity, on the other hand, has gone in a different direction, and created a whole new browser named Comet that is custom-built for such interactions. Perplexity might struggle with initial adoption — it is considerable friction to change a browser — but if users find value in its offering, they might permanently switch to Comet. Once that’s done, Perplexity would likely have gained a user that other companies would find it hard to pry away.
These are different approaches, and it remains to be seen which one ultimately succeeds. The biggest determinant, though, would be how useful such interactions are. Thus far, it’s not clear how entering in text into Claude is significantly easier than selecting drop-downs on Zillow or Doordash, but newer use-cases for the technology might emerge. And if agentic browsing does become a thing, Anthropic and Perplexity have both taken steps, albeit in diametrically opposite ways, towards dominating the space.