Google is shaking up the staff behind Project Mariner, its AI agent that may navigate the Chrome browser and full duties on a consumer’s behalf, WIRED has realized. In latest months, some Google Labs staffers who labored on the analysis prototype have moved on to higher-priority tasks, in accordance to two folks conversant in the matter.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the adjustments, however mentioned the pc use capabilities developed underneath Undertaking Mariner will likely be included into the firm’s agent technique shifting ahead. Google has already folded a few of these capabilities into different agent merchandise, together with the just lately launched Gemini Agent, the spokesperson added.
The change comes as Google and different AI labs rush to reply to the rise of extremely succesful brokers like OpenClaw. Whereas these instruments are largely utilized by builders right this moment, Silicon Valley believes they might quickly energy general-purpose assistants for folks and companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in contrast the buzzy software to a brand new working system for agentic computer systems. “Each firm in the world right this moment wants to have an OpenClaw technique,” he mentioned at the firm’s developer convention earlier this week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted Undertaking Mariner throughout last year’s I/O conference. At the time, browser brokers appeared like the business’s subsequent huge guess, with OpenAI and Perplexity launching shopper brokers that promised to automate on-line duties for customers. The brokers may click on, scroll, and fill out kinds on a webpage, very like a human. Nevertheless, the adoption of those merchandise has struggled to meet business expectations.
Perplexity’s Comet browser agent reached simply 2.8 million weekly active users in December 2025. In the meantime, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent reportedly fell to less than 1 million weekly active users in latest months. In contrast to the tons of of thousands and thousands of customers speaking to ChatGPT on a weekly foundation, browser agent utilization basically quantities to a rounding error.
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Momentum in the AI world has shifted dramatically in the final 12 months towards brokers like Claude Code and OpenClaw (whose creator was employed by OpenAI). Not like web-browsing brokers, these techniques management computer systems by means of the command-line, which has confirmed to be a extra dependable method to full duties. A few of these merchandise embrace pc use as a function, amongst different agentic skills. By comparability, browser brokers now appear considerably restricted as a stand-alone product.
Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of the AI upskilling platform Workera who lectures about AI at Stanford, says a part of the cause pc use brokers haven’t taken off is due to their large computational necessities. Most of those brokers work by taking a collection of screenshots of a webpage, feeding that into an AI mannequin, after which taking actions primarily based on what they see. Processing all of that information could be sluggish and at occasions unreliable.
“What Claude Code and OpenClaw confirmed was that it’s truly way more environment friendly to work with the terminal, as a result of the terminal is text-based and LLMs are text-based,” Katanforoosh mentioned. “It’s most likely 10 to 100X much less steps to get to the similar outcomes.”
This isn’t to say that browser brokers aren’t enhancing, or that analysis into pc use has hit a useless finish.
Final month, the startup Normal Intelligence launched a computer use model educated on movies, slightly than screenshots. The startup says it developed a video encoder that may compress movies into an AI mannequin’s context window, which it claims is 50X extra environment friendly than earlier pc use fashions. To indicate off its AI mannequin’s capabilities, the startup hooked it up to a automotive, a reside videofeed, and a pc keyboard. The mannequin was ready to briefly drive autonomously around San Francisco.
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