Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

Mozilla has reiterated its opposition to Google's decision to build AI plumbing into its Chrome browser, though rather belatedly now that the technology, known as the Prompt API, is already being tested in Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Jake Archibald, Mozilla web developer relations lead, articulated the org’s concerns in a GitHub discussion of the API, which provides a standard way to send and receive prompts and responses from a local machine learning model.

"We continue to oppose this API, and feel it has severe negative consequences to the interoperability, updatability, and neutrality of the web platform," said Archibald.

The Prompt API, as Google describes it, "gives web pages the ability to directly prompt a browser-provided language model." It provides a way to send natural language instructions to Google's Gemini Nano model, which is small enough to be downloaded for local inference through Chrome.

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