Perplexity AI on Wednesday unveiled Comet, its first AI-powered web browser, in a direct bid to loosen Google’s grip on how people discover information online. The desktop application installs the company’s answer-engine as the default search tool and introduces Comet Assistant, an on-screen agent that can summarise e-mails and calendar entries, manage tabs and navigate websites. Comet is initially limited to subscribers of Perplexity’s US$200-a-month Max plan and a small pool of invite-only testers. Within hours of the launch, Reuters reported that Microsoft-backed OpenAI is preparing to release its own AI-centric browser within weeks, citing three people familiar with the plans. The forthcoming product is being built on Google’s open-source Chromium code, will integrate the Operator agent and is designed to keep some user interactions inside a ChatGPT-style chat box, giving OpenAI greater access to browsing data. OpenAI declined to comment on the report. The back-to-back moves highlight an emerging contest to challenge Alphabet’s Chrome, which serves more than 3 billion users and accounts for roughly two-thirds of the global browser market. Analysts say adoption of either newcomer could siphon users from Chrome and, by extension, unsettle a core pillar of Google’s ad business. Perplexity processed 780 million search queries in May, while ChatGPT draws about 500 million weekly active users—audiences that could give the start-ups a toehold in a sector long dominated by Google.