Last week's launch of OpenAI Operator, an automated AI agent system, was the latest salvo in a running battle between the top AI mega-corps.
Anthropic’s remote agent, Computer Use, hit the streets earlier last year, creating a stir because of its power and versatility. These products use AI models connected to a web browser to automate tasks that would otherwise be done manually.
Early use cases involve doing things like automatically filling out online forms, doing web searches for products or services, or helping collect research information without human intervention. These AI tools tend to be expensive because of the computing power required to run them on the cloud. But now there’s a new and free alternative, coming once again from the open source ecosystem.
Swiss founded startup Browser Use has produced a direct competitor for Operator which is completely free, open source and allows the user to choose almost any AI model they want as the engine.
This combination of super flexibility and zero cost has already started to create waves in the AI agent marketplace. It’s not just that the product sounds good, it also works, which is quite a rarity in the AI startup arena at the moment.
This combination of super flexibility and zero cost has already started to create waves in the AI agent marketplace.
The company offers two versions of its product, a cloud option which is similar to OpenAI’s product — except it costs $30 a month instead of $200 — and an open source roll your own version.
The latter obviously needs more technical expertise, but gives the user a huge amount of flexibility in terms of what they can do with it.
Already there are people using it with DeepSeek, delivering a completely free end-to-end solution with not a dollar changing hands.
Magnus Muller, co-founder of Browser Use, believes there’s a growing conviction in the software world that collaboration is the future when it comes to AI development.
"The great thing about the open source community is how well we support each other," he said.
"It's completely different to the competition between commercial companies. We all benefit from each other's research and development, and that's a very powerful momentum to bring to any technology sector."
My early verdict
I found Browser Use to be surprisingly capable. I set it a test task to browse Amazon for "electric kettles", and give me a list of the top three rated kettles, along with live links to their product pages. That single prompt sent the agent scurrying off to do my bidding, and within 2 minutes I had my results.
The agent duly returned three recommendations, but only gave me one live link to a product. Possibly if I had spent more time crafting my prompt, I might have got all three links. I also received a nice video recording of the agent in action, valuable for post-mortems if you're doing important research.
I used GPT-4o for the test, with the agent running on my own PC, but there’s also an option to use free local AI models via Ollama. All of which takes some nerd skills of course.
Those without technical skills or the time to mess about with installation and set up should probably head for the cloud service.
The open source upheaval of AI
It’s beginning to look as though 2025 is destined to be the year when open source AI starts to hit its stride. Up to now expensive proprietary products have dominated the stage, but suddenly the whole AI world is turning upside down. And the market has taken notice.
This week has seen a cratering of the Nvidia stock price (almost $1 trillion of value wiped out, according to some reports), along with a sell-off of general AI stocks in the market.
Investors are waking up to the fact that the mythical moat — the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to create AI tech — may not be as wide as first thought. It’s enough to give venture capitalists the screaming fits as they turn in for the night.
The trend is still relatively slow as yet, a few breakout products do not a revolution make. But all the signs now point to the fact that open collaborative development can deliver shockingly significant and surprising breakthroughs.
The Chinese and Swiss just gave notice that this is likely to be more of a reality in the future than anyone imagined.
