We let OpenAI’s “Agent Mode” surf the web for us—here’s what happened

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Atlas, a new web browser with ChatGPT integration, to let you “chat with a page,” as the company puts it. But Atlas also goes beyond the usual LLM back-and-forth with Agent Mode, a “preview mode” feature the company says can “get work done for you” by clicking, scrolling, and reading through various tabs.

“Agentic” AI is far from new, of course; OpenAI itself rolled out a preview of the web browsing Operator agent in January and introduced the more generalized “ChatGPT agent” in July. Still, prominently featuring this capability in a major product release like this—even in “preview mode”—signals a clear push to get this kind of system in front of end users.

I wanted to put Atlas’ Agent Mode through its paces to see if it could really save me time in doing the kinds of tedious online tasks I plod through every ...