ChatGPT Atlas — ten months, one browser

• Source: The Verge · OpenAI deprecation notice (mined from the owner's backlog, 2026-08-26)
• Verdict: keep
• Why: the fastest complete lifecycle in the series so far. Atlas launched October 2025 to great fanfare about agentic browsing — an agent mode that took control of your tabs to do tasks for you, slowly, at $20/month, worse than doing it yourself. Ten months later it was dead, caught in the same internal "side quests" purge that had already eaten Sora.

The epitaphs write themselves. OpenAI's own framing: "the browser is a feature, not the destination." The farewell blog thanked "users who took a leap of faith on a new browser" — whose bookmarks, the support page notes, will not transfer automatically. The Windows version was canceled before shipping, which at least spared one platform. PCMag's verdict on the living product: practically any other browser was better at browsing.

Filed with special affection: the owner's original ChatGPT thread surveyed the AI-browser graveyard while Atlas was still breathing, and the assistant never once mentioned its own employer had a corpse in progress. The model reviewed everyone else's doom with total professionalism while its company led the category in velocity.