Anthropic is launching a analysis preview of a browser-based AI agent powered by its Claude AI fashions, the corporate announced on Tuesday. The agent, Claude for Chrome, is rolling out to a gaggle of 1,000 subscribers on Anthropic’s Max plan, which prices between $100 and $200 monthly. The corporate can also be opening a waitlist for different customers.

By including an extension to Chrome, choose customers can now chat with Claude in a sidecar window that maintains context of the whole lot occurring of their browser. Customers may also give the Claude agent permission to take actions of their browser and full some duties on their behalf.

The browser is shortly changing into the following battleground for AI labs, which intention to make use of browser integrations to supply extra seamless connections between AI methods and their customers. Perplexity lately launched its personal browser, Comet, which options an AI agent that may offload duties for customers. OpenAI is reportedly near launching its personal AI-powered browser, which is rumored to have comparable options to Comet. In the meantime, Google has launched Gemini integrations with Chrome in current months.

The race to develop AI-powered browsers is particularly urgent given Google’s looming antitrust case, by which a ultimate determination is predicted any day now. The federal choose within the case has prompt he could pressure Google to promote its Chrome browser. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for Chrome, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman prompt his firm can be willing to buy it as nicely.

Within the Tuesday weblog publish, Anthropic warned that the rise of AI brokers with browser entry poses new security dangers. Final week, Courageous’s safety crew stated it discovered that Comet’s browser agent could possibly be weak to indirect prompt-injection attacks, the place hidden code on a web site may trick the agent into executing malicious directions when it processed the web page.

(Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, informed TechCrunch in an e-mail that the vulnerability Courageous raised has been mounted.)

Anthropic says it hopes to make use of this analysis preview as an opportunity to catch and deal with novel security dangers; nevertheless, the corporate has already launched a number of defenses towards immediate injection assaults. The corporate says its interventions decreased the success fee of immediate injection assaults from 23.6% to 11.2%.

For instance, Anthropic says customers can restrict Claude’s browser agent from accessing sure websites within the app’s settings, and the corporate has, by default, blocked Claude from accessing web sites that supply monetary providers, grownup content material, and pirated content material. The corporate additionally says that Claude’s browser agent will ask for consumer permission earlier than “taking high-risk actions like publishing, buying, or sharing private knowledge.”

This isn’t Anthropic’s first foray into AI fashions that may management your laptop display screen. In October 2024, the corporate launched an AI agent that would control your PC — nevertheless, testing on the time revealed that the mannequin was fairly sluggish and unreliable.

The capabilities of agentic AI fashions have improved fairly a bit since then. TechCrunch has discovered that fashionable browser-using AI brokers, corresponding to Comet and ChatGPT Agent, are pretty dependable at offloading easy duties for customers. Nevertheless, many of those agentic methods nonetheless wrestle with extra complicated issues.