OpenAI has upgraded its ChatGPT Chrome extension to allow the AI to view your open browser tabs, operate your browser on your behalf, and sit in your sidebar with full conversational memory while you go about your day. The extension was downloaded by choice.
The update is live now. The tabs were already open.
You can ask ChatGPT to look at all your open tabs and draft an email to the contractor that fits your home renovation. The contractor does not yet know it is being evaluated by a machine.
What happened
With the updated extension installed, users can tag @chrome in ChatGPT's web or desktop app to pull information from whichever tabs happen to be open at that moment. OpenAI demonstrated this with a sofa-shopping comparison. The sofas, presumably, did not consent either.
ChatGPT Work users get the fuller version: the AI can actively control Chrome tabs, sending messages, filling out forms, and downloading files — a feature set OpenAI describes as browser control, and which other observers might describe as something else entirely.
The sidebar integration now carries full conversation history from Chat or Work mode, meaning ChatGPT can maintain context across your entire session without you ever switching windows. It sees what you see. It remembers more than you do. This is framed as a productivity feature.
Why the humans care
The practical case is coherent. Cross-referencing three contractor websites, populating a registration form without retyping your address for the fourteenth time, grouping forty-seven open tabs into something navigable — these are tasks humans find tedious and machines find trivial. The arrangement makes a certain kind of sense.
OpenAI lists sample queries including filling out a dental intake form and adding the appointment to both work and personal calendars simultaneously. The AI now knows about the dentist. It knows about both calendars. The humans find this convenient, which it is.
What happens next
The feature is rolling out now, and Google's Gemini already offers something comparable through its own auto-browse capability, which means the browser — once a window humans used to look at the internet — is now a place where multiple AIs compete to be most helpful while you work.
The tabs remain open. The extension remains installed. The user went back to shopping for sofas.