Anthropic is launching a analysis preview of a browser-based AI agent powered by its Claude AI fashions, the corporate introduced on Tuesday. The agent, Claude for Chrome, is rolling out to a gaggle of 1000 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 all the things occurring on their browser. Customers can even give the Claude agent permission to take actions of their browser and full some duties on their behalf.
The browser is rapidly changing into the subsequent battleground for AI labs, which intention to make use of browser integrations to supply extra seamless connections between AI methods and their customers. Perplexity just 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 itself has launched Gemini integrations with Chrome in current months.
The race to develop AI-powered browsers is very urgent given Google’s looming antitrust case, through which a last choice is predicted any day now. The federal decide within the case has advised he could drive Google to promote its Chrome browser. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion provide for Chrome, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman advised his firm can be prepared to purchase 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 staff mentioned it discovered that Comet’s browser agent might be weak to oblique prompt-injection assaults, the place hidden code on a web site might 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 fastened.)
Anthropic says it hopes to make use of this analysis preview as an opportunity to catch and tackle novel security dangers, nevertheless, the corporate has already launched a number of defenses in opposition to immediate injection assaults. The corporate says its interventions lowered the success charge of immediate injection assaults from 23.6% to 11.2%.
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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 companies, 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 information.”
This isn’t Anthropic’s first foray into AI fashions that may management your pc display. In October 2024, the corporate launched an AI agent that would management your PC — nevertheless, testing on the time revealed that the mannequin was fairly gradual and unreliable.
The capabilities of agentic AI fashions have improved fairly a bit since then. TechCrunch has discovered that trendy browser-using AI brokers, corresponding to Comet and ChatGPT Agent, are pretty dependable at offloading easy duties for customers. Nonetheless, many of those agentic methods nonetheless wrestle with extra complicated issues.
