Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner
Agentic browsers are too risky for most organizations to use, according to analyst firm Gartner.
The firm offered that advice last week in a new advisory titled “Cybersecurity Must Block AI Browsers for Now,” in which research VP Dennis Xu, senior director analyst Evgeny Mirolyubov, and VP analyst John Watts observe “Default AI browser settings prioritize user experience over security.”
The analysts’ definition of an AI browser encompasses tools like Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas that include two elements:
An “AI sidebar” that offers users the chance to summarize, search, translate, and interact with web content using AI services provided by the browser’s developer
An agentic transaction capability that allows the browser to autonomously navigate, interact with, and complete tasks on websites, especially within authenticated web sessions.
Gartner’s document warns that AI sidebars mean “Sensitive user data – such as active web content, browsing history, and open tabs – is often sent to the cloud-based AI back end, increasing the risk of data exposure unless security and privacy settings are deliberately hardened and centrally managed.”
The document suggests it’s possible to mitigate those risks by assessing the back-end AI services that power an AI browser to understand if their security measures present an acceptable risk to your organization.
If that process leads to approval for use of a browser’s back-end AI, Gartner advises organizations should still “Educate users that anything they are viewing could potentially be sent to the AI service back end to ensure they do not have highly sensitive data active on the browser tab while using the AI browser’s sidebar to summarize or perform other autonomous actions.”
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