Originally published on LinkedIn. View the original post ↗
Anthropic quietly added what I think is a transformational capability to Cowork: a built-in browser.
ChatGPT Work already had one. As someone who is, by any reasonable measure, pretty AI-pilled, I had already started shifting a certain class of work toward it.
One example:
“Find me hotels near a conference I’m attending in San Francisco. They need to be walkable or a single stop away on public transit. I want a gym, and by gym I mean actual strength equipment, not just cardio.”
Off it went.
It analyzed distance, price, and transit options in a geography I do not know. It also investigated the hotel gyms closely enough to distinguish meaningful strength equipment from an amenity page that merely says “fitness center.”
None of those individual steps is especially difficult. The friction comes from crossing the boundaries between the conference location, hotel listings, maps, transit routes, prices, reviews, and photos. A normal search leaves me to stitch that together. The browser agent could work across it.
That connects directly to something I heard at yesterday’s Apex Chamber of Commerce. Apex Intelligence breakfast.
Matt Riley gave an excellent show of how far practical AI can go once it is wired into actual work at New Home Inc.: sales reporting, closing schedules, contract preparation, marketing production, and training. Dashboards and connectors and automated workflow - in other words, the destination many people are trying to achieve.
Pretty soon the audience was no longer asking, “What can I do with AI?” Instead, it was “How do I get started?”
Connecting an AI to a browser used to be kludgy. Extensions, permissions, custom integrations, and a small ceremony involving crossed fingers. Now both OpenAI and Anthropic package the capability directly into their agent experiences.
Browser automation only scrapes the surface of the efficiency Matt demonstrated. It is slower and more fragile than a proper connector, API, or purpose-built workflow. I would not make it the permanent foundation of a critical recurring process.
But it is an unusually good way to make the capability tangible.