Anthropic rolls out the Claude agent in Chrome preview

Anthropic has launched a research preview of Claude for Chrome, a browser agent that runs in a side panel and stays aware of what you are doing online. The preview is rolling out to 1,000 subscribers on the company’s Max plan, which costs $100 to $200 per month, with a waitlist for others. After adding the extension, users can chat with Claude about the page in view, grant it permission to take actions in the browser, and ask it to complete some tasks end to end. The browser is becoming a battleground for AI labs. Perplexity recently launched Comet, a browser with an agent that offloads tasks. OpenAI is reportedly close to releasing an AI-powered browser with similar ideas, and Google has added Gemini integrations to Chrome. The competition unfolds as Google faces a pending antitrust ruling, as a federal judge suggested he may order a sale of Chrome. Perplexity has made an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for the browser, and OpenAI chief Sam Altman said his company would be willing to buy it. Anthropic is framing Claude for Chrome as a safety exercise as well as a convenience feature. Browser agents face risks such as indirect prompt injection, where hidden instructions on a website try to hijack the agent when it reads a page. Brave’s security team recently flagged such a weakness in Comet; Perplexity says the issue has been fixed. Anthropic says defenses it has deployed cut prompt-injection success in its tests from 23.6% to 11.2%. Users can limit which sites Claude can access in settings, and by default, the agent is blocked from websites that offer financial services, adult content, or pirated content. It will also ask for permission before high-risk steps such as publishing, purchasing, or sharing personal data. This is not Anthropic’s first system that can operate a computer. In October 2024, the company released a desktop-control agent that early tests found to be slow and unreliable. Agentic models have improved since then. TechCrunch reports that browser agents such as Comet and ChatGPT Agent handle simple chores reliably, though many still struggle with complex problems.