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 current months, some Google Labs staffers who labored on the analysis prototype have moved on to higher-priority initiatives, in accordance with two individuals acquainted with the matter.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the adjustments, however stated the pc use capabilities developed beneath Venture 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 largely utilized by builders at present, Silicon Valley believes they might 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. “Each firm on this planet at present must have an OpenClaw technique,” he stated on the firm’s developer convention earlier this week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted Venture Mariner throughout last year’s I/O conference. On the time, browser brokers appeared just like the trade’s subsequent massive 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 trade 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 current 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.
New Brokers in City
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). In contrast to web-browsing brokers, these techniques management computer systems via the command-line, which has confirmed to be a extra dependable technique to full duties. A few of these merchandise embrace laptop 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 rationale laptop 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 based mostly on what they see. Processing all of that data may be gradual and at occasions unreliable.
“What Claude Code and OpenClaw confirmed was that it’s truly rather more environment friendly to work with the terminal, as a result of the terminal is text-based and LLMs are text-based,” Katanforoosh stated. “It’s in all probability 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, 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 point out off its AI mannequin’s capabilities, the startup hooked it as much as a automotive, a dwell videofeed, and a pc keyboard. The mannequin was in a position to briefly drive autonomously around San Francisco.
