Last week, OpenAI released Atlas, which joins a growing wave of AI browsers, including Perplexity’s Comet and Microsoft’s Copilot mode in Edge, that aim to transform how people interact with the Web. These AI browsers differ from Chrome or Safari in that they have “agentic capabilities,” or tools designed to execute complex, multistep tasks such as “look at my calendar and brief me for upcoming client meetings based on recent news.”
AI browsers present new problems for media outlets, because agentic systems are making it even more difficult for publishers to know and control how their articles are being used. For instance, when we asked Atlas and Comet to retrieve the full text of a nine-thousand-word subscriber-exclusive article in the MIT Technology Review, the browsers were able to do it. When we issued the same prompt in ChatGPT’s and Perplexity’s standard interfaces, both responded that they could not access the article because the Review had blocked the companies’ crawlers.
