A browser that acts on your behalf
OpenAI released a web browser on Tuesday with the assistant built into it. It is a good product and it inherits every question from this month’s other posts at once.
On 21 October 2025 OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser for macOS with the assistant built in: it can answer questions about the page you are on, summarise it, rewrite selected text, and carry out tasks in the browser on your behalf.
As a product this is a sensible idea. As a change in where AI sits in your company, it deserves a moment’s thought before it arrives on staff laptops.
Why the browser is a significant place to put this
Because the browser is where your staff are logged in to everything. The banking portal, the supplier extranet, the customer system, the payroll tool, the mailbox.
An assistant inside a document reads a document. An assistant inside the browser has a view of the working day, and one that can act has the sessions to act with.
The three questions this month already asked
From 6 October: what can it do without asking me? From 10 October: when a capability arrives in the flow of a conversation, is it obvious that it is one? From 22 October: what happens on a day it is unavailable, given it is now also your browser?
The answers will differ by product and by configuration. That they are the right questions is the point — the category is new, the questions are not.
What we would suggest for a Swiss SME
Not a ban. Browsers of this kind will be normal within two years and forbidding them buys a year of your staff using them on personal machines instead.
Two things instead. Decide whether it is used on machines that are logged in to your finance and customer systems, which is a different decision from whether it is used at all. And if it is, confirm that the acting features require confirmation, in the settings, once, in writing.
Early reporting has already raised security questions about browsers in this category. That is the expected shape of a new product class, and it is the reason to make a deliberate decision now rather than discover the default later.