San Francisco (Reuters, AFP)

OpenAI on Tuesday launched ChatGPT Atlas, an artificial intelligence-powered browser built around its popular chatbot that aims to loosen Google Chrome's tight grip on the market.

Shares of Alphabet, which owns the Chrome browser, were down 2.6% in afternoon trading.

The product is the latest entrant in a fast-crowding field of AI browsers that includes Perplexity's Comet and Opera's Neon as companies weave in tools that can summarize pages, fill out forms and draft code to attract users.

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Atlas lets users open a ChatGPT sidebar in any window to summarize content, compare products, or analyze data from any site.

Altman and a team of executives demonstrated an "agent" mode that has a chatbot conduct searches on a user's behalf.

Altman said that in agent mode, ChatGPT uses the web browser independently, returning with what it finds.

"It's got all your stuff and is clicking around," Altman said.

"You can watch it or not, you don't have to, but it's using the internet for you."

Atlas will go live on Tuesday on computers powered by Apple's operating system (macOS), but agent mode will only be available to users of Plus or Pro versions of ChatGPT, according to Altman.

"We want to bring this to Windows and to mobile devices as quickly as we can," Altman said, without providing a timeline.

"This is still early days for this project."

The agent mode interacts with sites for users, who can use it to do tasks from start to finish, like researching and shopping for a trip.

It will soon be made available on Windows, iOS and Android.

Reuters had in July reported the AI startup, backed by Microsoft, was close to releasing an AI-powered web browser that will challenge Alphabet's market-dominating Google Chrome.