Google might have to sell Chrome — and OpenAI wants to buy it

It feels like all of the big tech companies practically live in courtrooms lately, but it also feels like not much really comes of it. Decisions get made and unmade again, and it takes a long time for anything to affect consumers. At the moment, Google is in danger of getting dismantled and sold for parts — and if it really happens, OpenAI has told the judge that it would be interested in buying.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, currently doesn’t work with Google at all. Apparently, it wanted to make a deal last year to use Google’s search technology with ChatGPT but it didn’t work out. Instead, OpenAI is now working on its own search index but it’s turning out to be a much more time-consuming project than anticipated.

The company originally thought it would be taking care of 80% of ChatGPT queries with its own search index by the end of this year, but now thinks that milestone will take multiple years to reach. This, along with “significant quality issues” with the search technology it’s currently using, are the reasons OpenAI says it would be interested in buying Chrome if it goes on sale.

Since millions and millions of people use Chrome as their browser, this is something that would definitely affect users if it really happened. What would OpenAI do with Chrome after buying it? There’s no way to know, of course, but one might assume that the product would be rebranded and combined with ChatGPT to make some kind of AI-powered browsing, searching, and image-generating monster. Maybe the rumored OpenAI social network would end up in there as well.

Naturally, Google is appealing the ruling that officially labels it a “monopolist” in online search, so the fight likely isn’t over yet. But Google’s search engine market share hovers right around the 90% mark, and it seems very hard to argue that it’s not a monopoly. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take another five years to find out how this will all end.