As the fate of Chrome hangs in the balance of the Google antitrust trial, one thing is clear: OpenAI wants to buy it.
During the ongoing remedy phase of the Department of Justice’s case against Google, OpenAI executive Nick Turley testified on Tuesday that his company would be interested in buying Chrome if Google was forced to sell it. Selling the Chrome web browser is one of the DOJ’s proposed remedies for breaking up Google’s search monopoly.
Turley, head of product for ChatGPT, was a DOJ witness during the hearing. When asked whether OpenAI would be interested in buying Chrome if Google was forced to divest it, Turley said, “Yes, we would, as would many other parties,” as Bloomberg reported.
OpenAI is one of Google’s chief rivals in the artificial intelligence arms race, and acquiring Chrome could be quite the coup for OpenAI. Chrome currently has around 66 percent of the browser market share.
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U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled last summer that “Google is a monopolist” in the search market. Now, the trial is in its remedy phase, where the court will decide how exactly to break up Google. Besides divesting from Chrome, the DOJ has also suggested that Google could share its search data with other companies.
Enter, OpenAI. Turley also testified that OpenAI approached Google last summer to strike a licensing deal for its search data for developing its ChatGPT search product, which connects ChatGPT to the web for real-time search answers. But Google turned down the offer from its rival, which has siphoned off users who prefer using ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines.
Through OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, ChatGPT’s real-time search uses Bing. But Turley (without naming Microsoft) said forcing Google to share its search data would “‘allow us to build a better product faster’ by ‘improving the quality of real-time information,'” according to The Information.
The outlet previously reported that OpenAI was looking into building its own web browser, even hiring two central people from the Chrome division. An OpenAI web browser with ChatGPT at the forefront and increasing agentic capabilities for autonomous web browsing could be a critical new piece in the user experience.
So, while losing Chrome would be a massive blow to Google’s business, losing Chrome to OpenAI could have big implications for the future of the internet as we know it.
