Ask HN: Why every AI company is building a browser?
It seems every one is building AI browser.
Perplexity has Comet, Dia. Open AI is build its own. What is business justifications?
They can pretend to be humans when requesting content from sites, thus bypassing blocks by Cloudflare et al. The content can be then passed to the AI mothership.
They also get complete visibility over what you do, as @benouau says.
If an Agentic requests originate from a server - it is easy for receivers to block the server. Write a browser-plugin and you are playing in somebody else's garden.
Write a browser and now you get to pretend like a human!
Google has also locked-down default search engine on every major browser, including in at least Apple's case contractual obligation not to provide a search engine selection screen so they're fighting an up-hill battle for adoption there.
This doesn't allow for much and I think especially in terms of agent-control, for example IIUC Playwright and Puppeteer have always had to use modified derivatives of the main browsers for their automation.
It’s not that hard.
Plus, riding the hype wave.