Google is shaking up the workforce behind Project Mariner, its AI agent that may navigate the Chrome browser and full duties on a person’s behalf, WIRED has realized. In current months, some Google Labs staffers who labored on the analysis prototype have moved on to higher-priority initiatives, in response to two individuals acquainted with the matter.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the adjustments, however stated the pc use capabilities developed below Project Mariner will likely be integrated into the corporate’s agent technique transferring ahead. Google has already folded a few of these capabilities into different agent merchandise, together with the not too long ago 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. While these instruments are principally utilized by builders as we speak, Silicon Valley believes they may quickly energy general-purpose assistants for individuals and companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in contrast the buzzy software to a brand new working system for agentic computer systems. “Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy,” he stated on the firm’s developer convention earlier this week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted Project Mariner throughout final 12 months’s I/O convention. At 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 like a human. However, the adoption of those merchandise has struggled to fulfill business expectations.
Perplexity’s Comet browser agent reached simply 2.8 million weekly energetic customers in December 2025. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent reportedly fell to lower than 1 million weekly energetic customers in current months. Compared to the a whole bunch of tens of millions of customers speaking to ChatGPT on a weekly foundation, browser agent utilization primarily quantities to a rounding error.
New Agents in Town
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). Unlike web-browsing brokers, these programs management computer systems by means of the command-line, which has confirmed to be a extra dependable technique to full duties. Some of those merchandise embody laptop use as a characteristic, 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 rationale laptop use brokers haven’t taken off is due to their large 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 primarily based on what they see. Processing all of that info could be gradual and at occasions unreliable.
“What Claude Code and OpenClaw showed was that it’s actually much more efficient to work with the terminal, because the terminal is text-based and LLMs are text-based,” Katanforoosh stated. “It’s probably 10 to 100X less steps to get to the same outcomes.”
This isn’t to say that browser brokers aren’t bettering, or that analysis into laptop use has hit a useless finish.
Last month, the startup Standard Intelligence launched a pc use mannequin educated on movies, reasonably 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 showcase its AI mannequin’s capabilities, the startup hooked it as much as a automotive, a stay videofeed, and a pc keyboard. The mannequin was capable of briefly drive autonomously round San Francisco.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-project-mariner-team-web-browsing-agents/