Google is shaking up the staff behind Undertaking Mariner, its AI agent that may navigate the Chrome browser and full duties on a consumer’s behalf, WIRED has realized. In current months, some Google Labs staffers who labored on the analysis prototype have moved on to higher-priority tasks, based on two folks conversant in the matter.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the modifications, however mentioned the pc use capabilities developed underneath Undertaking Mariner might be included into the corporate’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 answer the rise of extremely succesful brokers like OpenClaw. Whereas these instruments are principally utilized by builders at present, Silicon Valley believes they may quickly energy general-purpose assistants for folks and companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in contrast the buzzy instrument to a brand new working system for agentic computer systems. “Each firm on the earth at present 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 yr’s I/O convention. On the time, browser brokers appeared just like the business’s subsequent huge wager, 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 types on a webpage, very similar to a human. Nonetheless, the adoption of those merchandise has struggled to fulfill business expectations.
Perplexity’s Comet browser agent reached simply 2.8 million weekly lively customers in December 2025. In the meantime, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent reportedly fell to lower than 1 million weekly lively customers in current months. In comparison with the tons of of tens of millions of customers speaking to ChatGPT on a weekly foundation, browser agent utilization basically quantities to a rounding error.
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Momentum within the AI world has shifted dramatically within the final yr towards brokers like Claude Code and OpenClaw (whose creator was employed by OpenAI). Not like web-browsing brokers, these programs management computer systems by way 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 explanation 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 data will be sluggish and at instances unreliable.
“What Claude Code and OpenClaw confirmed was that it’s really far 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 bettering, or that analysis into pc use has hit a useless finish.
Final month, the startup Commonplace Intelligence launched a pc use mannequin educated on movies, moderately 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 point out off its AI mannequin’s capabilities, the startup hooked it as much as a automobile, a dwell videofeed, and a pc keyboard. The mannequin was capable of briefly drive autonomously round San Francisco.
