Chrome Can Now Use AI to Browse the Internet for You

The announcement that Chrome can now use AI to browse the internet for you marks a pivotal, if subtle, shift in the trajectory of large language models. It’s a move from pure text generation to active, autonomous task completion—a step closer to the agentic AI systems that have long been theorized.But this evolution begs a critical question, one that underpins much of the current debate in AI safety and capability research: does the large language model need to disassociate too? In other words, as these models move from being passive oracles to active agents operating in the messy, real-time web, must their architecture fundamentally change to separate reasoning from action, or ‘thought’ from ‘deed’? This isn't just an academic concern. An LLM acting directly on the web, clicking links and filling forms, inherits all the model's inherent biases and hallucinatory tendencies, but now with real-world consequences—making a purchase, posting a comment, or sharing data.Researchers like those at Anthropic and DeepMind have been exploring ‘constitutional AI’ and other methods to instill robust safeguards, but Chrome’s integration brings the problem to billions of users overnight. The historical precedent here is the web crawler, but this is a crawler with persuasive language skills and zero innate understanding of truth.The expert commentary is divided: some see this as the necessary path to truly useful AI assistants, while others warn of an unprecedented scale for misinformation and automated manipulation. The consequence is a new front in the alignment race, where the battleground is no longer just a chat window, but the entire digital economy.

#featured

#Chrome

#AI browsing

#large language models

#web automation

#Google

#generative AI