anildash.com

10/22/2025

This Thing Needs a Warning Label

Here’s what’s most key for contextualizing the Atlas browser: this is the same company whose chatbot keeps telling vulnerable children to self-harm, and they do, and now a number of them are dead. When those who are in psychological distress engage with these tools, they very frequently get pulled into states of extreme duress — which OpenAI knows keenly well because even one of their own investors has gone off the deep end when over-using the platform. In fact, the user experience feature that OpenAI is most effective at creating is emotional dependency amongst its users, as evidenced by the level of despondency its users showedafter the recent release of GPT-5.

When users respond to a software update by expressing deep emotional distress, and that they feel like they’ve lost a friend, you have a profound bug. If there are enough grieving parents who have been devastated by your technology that they can form a support group for each other, then there should at the very least be a pretty aggressive warning label on this application when it is initially installed. Then, at a far less serious level, if this product is going to have extreme and invasive effects on markets and cultural ecosystems without disclosing the mechanisms it uses to do so, and without asking the consent of the many parties whose intellectual property and labor it will rely on to accomplish those ends, then we need to have a much broader reckoning.

Also, I love the web, and this thing is bad for the web.

I really, really want there to be more browsers! I want there to be lots of weird new ways of going around the web. I have my own LLM that I trained with my own content, and I bet if everybody else could have one like mine that they control, that had perfect privacy and wasn’t owned by any big company, and never sent their data anywhere or did anything creepy, they’d want the benefits of that, too. It would even be awesome if that were integrated with their browser — with their web browser. I’m all for people trying strange new geeky things, and innovating on the experiences we have every day so we’re not just stuck typing in the same boxes we’ve been using for decades, or settling for the same few experiences.

Hell, there’s even room for innovation on command-line interfaces! They’re not inherently terrible (I use one every day!), but regular folks shouldn’t have one forced on them for ordinary tasks. And the majority of things people do on a computer are better when they rely on the zeroes-and-ones reliability of computers, when we know if what they’re doing is true or false. We need to have fewer things in the world that make us wonder whether everything is just made up bullshit.

The Anti-Web Endgame

The web was designed without the concept of personal identity at all, and without any tracking system built in. It was designed for anybody to be able to create what they want, and even for anybody to be able to make their own web browser. Not long after its invention, people came up with ideas like cookies and made different systems for logging in, and then big companies started coming in and realized that if they could control the browser, they’d control all the users and the ways of making money. Ever since, there’s been a long series of battles over privacy versus monetization, but there’s been some small protection for users, who benefitted from those smart original design choices back at the birth of the web.

It’s very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web’s original design. The last few decades, where advertising was targeting people by their interests instead of directly by their actual identity, now sees AI companies trying to create an environment of complete surveillance. That requires a new Interent where there’s no concept of consent for either users or those who create content and culture — everything is just raw materials, and all of us are fair game.

The most worrisome part is that Atlas looks so familiar, and feels so innocuous, that people will try it and mistake it for a familiar web browser just like the other tools that they’ve been using for years. But Atlas is a browser that actively fights against the web, and in doing so, it’s fighting against the very idea that you should have control over what you see, where you go, and what watches you while you’re there.