You’ll soon be able to integrate Anthropic’s chatbot into your online life even more easily. Claude for Chrome, a new extension that implants the AI model right into the web browser, will allow users to analyze and summarize webpages on screen, the company said in a press release on Tuesday.
The extension, which is currently being piloted with 1,000 subscribers on the Max plan, which costs $200 per month, has both analysis and agentic capabilities. Not only will it summarize your emails and analyze products you’re shopping for online, but it can also act on your behalf. This includes helping to manage calendars, schedule meetings or test new website features.
There’s a reason Anthropic, the creator of Claude, is being cautious about a wider release: security.
As powerful as AI systems are, they aren’t without vulnerabilities. Brave, another web browser with AI capabilities, published a report last week that Perplexity’s Comet AI web browser was susceptible to prompt injection attacks. (Perplexity has since patched the issue.) Anthropic acknowledges the same risk.
Prompt injection is a method by which someone tries to make an AI do things it wasn’t programmed to do. By using clever language, the bad actor can circumvent safeguards and make the AI accidentally hand over login credentials or other sensitive information. Malicious instructions can be hidden on websites as invisible text, so when an AI analyzes the contents of a web page, it could take in and activate this guidance without you knowing it.
In Anthropic’s testing, it found that Claude for Chrome, without safety mitigations, would follow malicious instructions 23.6% of the time. To combat this, Anthropic added site-level permissions so that users can revoke access to specific sites in settings.
Moreover, Claude for Chrome will ask users before taking high-risk actions, like buying something or sharing personal data. As a precaution, Anthropic says it’s blocked Claude from working on high-risk categories, like financial services, adult content and pirated content. These safety mitigations lowered the attack success rate from 23.6% to 11.2%.
“We’ve begun to build and test advanced classifiers to detect suspicious instruction patterns and unusual data access requests –even when they arise in seemingly legitimate contexts,” Anthropic said in its blog post.
Anthropic referred to its blog post when asked for comment.
Claude for Chrome comes as other players in the AI race begin building tools to bring AI to web browsers. AI search engine Perplexity released its own Chromium-based AI web browser, Comet, to select users earlier this year. Google also announced Gemini in Chrome earlier this year, which is available for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Microsoft Edge has Copilot built in, as does Brave with Leo and Opera with Aria.
As AI companies compete with similar products, users will ultimately find the AI they like most and stick with it. By embedding your favorite chatbot into your internet browsing, that specific AI will become more integrated into your day-to-day activity, possibly making it burdensome to switch around. AI can also glean a lot of data about you through browser usage, which can better inform ways to target you with advertising.
