Google is shaking up the crew behind Undertaking Mariner, its AI agent that may navigate the Chrome browser and full duties on a person’s behalf, WIRED has realized. In latest months, some Google Labs staffers who labored on the analysis prototype have moved on to higher-priority initiatives, in line with two folks acquainted with the matter.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the modifications, however mentioned the pc use capabilities developed underneath Undertaking Mariner will likely be included into the corporate’s agent technique transferring 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 answer the rise of extremely succesful brokers like OpenClaw. Whereas these instruments are principally utilized by builders immediately, Silicon Valley believes they may quickly energy general-purpose assistants for folks and companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in contrast the buzzy device to a brand new working system for agentic computer systems. “Each firm on the earth immediately must have an OpenClaw technique,” he mentioned on the firm’s developer convention earlier this week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted Undertaking Mariner throughout final 12 months’s I/O convention. On the time, browser brokers appeared just like the trade’s subsequent large guess, with OpenAI and Perplexity launching shopper brokers that promised to automate on-line duties for customers. The brokers might click on, scroll, and fill out varieties on a webpage, very like a human. Nevertheless, the adoption of those merchandise has struggled to satisfy trade expectations.
Perplexity’s Comet browser agent reached simply 2.8 million weekly energetic customers in December 2025. In the meantime, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent reportedly fell to less than 1 million weekly active users in latest months. In comparison with the a whole lot of thousands and thousands of customers speaking to ChatGPT on a weekly foundation, browser agent utilization primarily quantities to a rounding error.
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Momentum within the AI world has shifted dramatically within the final 12 months towards brokers like Claude Code and OpenClaw (whose creator was employed by OpenAI). Not like web-browsing brokers, these programs management computer systems via the command-line, which has confirmed to be a extra dependable approach to full duties. A few of these merchandise embrace laptop use as a function, amongst different agentic talents. 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 explanation laptop use brokers haven’t taken off is due to their huge computational necessities. Most of those brokers work by taking a sequence of screenshots of a webpage, feeding that into an AI mannequin, after which taking actions based mostly on what they see. Processing all of that data will be sluggish and at instances 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 identical outcomes.”
This isn’t to say that browser brokers aren’t enhancing, or that analysis into laptop use has hit a useless finish.
Final month, the startup Normal Intelligence launched a computer use model educated on movies, fairly 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 laptop use fashions. To point out off its AI mannequin’s capabilities, the startup hooked it as much as a automotive, a reside videofeed, and a pc keyboard. The mannequin was in a position to briefly drive autonomously around San Francisco.
