Anthropic is finally letting more people use the cloud in Google Chrome. The company’s AI browser plugin is expanding beyond the $200 per month maximum number of subscribers and is now available to anyone who pays for a cloud subscription.
The Cloud Chrome plugin allows easy access to Anthropic’s AI no matter where you are on the web, but its real charm is how it lets the cloud navigate and use websites on your behalf. Anthropic says the cloud can fill out forms, manage your calendars and email, and complete multi-step workflows based on a prompt. The latest version of the plugin also includes integration with Cloud Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, and allows users to record workflows and “teach” the cloud how to do what they want.
Before agents became popular, “computer use”, the ability of AI models to understand and interact with computer interfaces, was a major focus of Anthropic and other AI companies. Now using a computer is just one tool in a larger tool bag for agents, but understanding which digital buttons to click and how to click them is what makes the cloud’s Chrome plugin possible.
OpenAI and Perplexity provide similar agentive capabilities in their respective ChatGPT Atlas and Comet browsers. The only AI company at this point that isn’t setting its AI models solely on the browser is Google. You can access Gemini in Google Chrome and ask questions about a webpage, but Google has not yet allowed its AI models to navigate or use its AI models on the user’s behalf. Those features, which were first showcased in Project Mariner, are possibly on the way.
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