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OpenAI rival Anthropic has now rolled out its chatbot Claude as a Chrome extension for all paying subscribers in beta.
The AI firm says the new extension will be able to navigate websites on your behalf, fill in forms, and complete scheduled tasks, accessing multiple tabs in the process. You'll need to pay a minimum of $20 per month for a Pro subscription to access the Claude for Chrome extension, an $80 downgrade from when Anthropic started beta testing the feature exclusively for $200-per-month Max users in November.
If you're not a Chrome fan, the tool is also available on alternative browsers like Brave and Opera, which use the same Chromium engine for their underlying infrastructure. Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge are not officially supported, however.
Anthropic acknowledged the "safety and security challenges" that come with incorporating chatbots directly into your browser experience, including the risks of what is known as prompt injection attacks. This is where hackers try to input deceptive and malicious text into a large language model (LLM) like Claude. The company detailed some of the safety features it included to protect against these types of attacks, for example, the ability to control site-level permissions, where users can grant or revoke Claude's access to specific websites at any time via the Settings tab.
In addition, the extension will also ask users before carrying out "high-risk actions" like publishing content, purchasing things online, or sharing personal data. It will also automatically block itself when accessing high-risk websites, for example, financial services websites such as your bank, pornography, or pirated content such as torrent databases.
Anthropic certainly isn't the only firm incorporating what's called "agentic AI," where AI does things on your behalf (as opposed to just answering questions), directly into browsers. OpenAI rolled out Atlas in October of this year, offering broadly comparable features to the new extension, though it also requires a Premium subscription to use. Meanwhile, the ChatGPT maker's CEO Sam Altman has been extolling "agentic AI" as the future, as have figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
And if you don't feel like forking out a monthly subscription for your AI browser, Perplexity Comet started rolling out for free users in October.