ChatGPT Atlas Is Shutting Down: What to Save Before August 9
OpenAI retires its Atlas browser on August 9, 2026. The quick export checklist for bookmarks, tabs, and logins, what happens to your chat history, and where to go next.
OpenAI is retiring ChatGPT Atlas, its AI browser for the Mac, on August 9, 2026. The company announced the shutdown on July 9 and gave users a month to move out. If Atlas has been your daily browser, you have a short list of things to export before the deadline, and a decision to make about where your browsing and your AI assistant live next.
What happens on August 9
OpenAI's support page is unusually direct about what the date means: after August 9, Atlas “may no longer open, browse pages, or run any agentic task at all.” The announcement describes no read-only mode and no wind-down period. Once the date passes, plan on the app simply not working.
Atlas launched on October 21, 2025 as a macOS-only browser for Apple Silicon Macs. Windows, iOS, and Android versions were promised and never arrived. Not quite ten months later, OpenAI is pointing users back to ChatGPT itself.
The export checklist
The whole migration takes about twenty minutes. Four things to check:
Bookmarks. Open the bookmark manager in Atlas and export your bookmarks as an HTML file. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and every other mainstream browser can import that file directly. This is the one export that is genuinely one click each way.
Open tabs and history. Neither transfers. If you have research parked in open tabs, bookmark them now so they land in the HTML export, or copy the URLs somewhere safe. Same for anything important buried in your history.
Logins and cookies. Sessions do not move between browsers, so expect to sign back in to everything and to redo two-factor prompts. With a password manager this is painless. If Atlas was quietly holding sessions for you, budget a little extra time.
Your ChatGPT history. This one is safe. Conversations are tied to your ChatGPT account and stay available in the ChatGPT apps and on the web. Nothing to export.
Where OpenAI points you next
OpenAI's suggested landing spots are the ChatGPT desktop app for agentic work, the ChatGPT extension in Chrome for help alongside whatever page you are on, and Codex for developer workflows. If everything you do already runs through ChatGPT, that trade is reasonable, and your workflow should land mostly intact.
The part a new browser will not fix
Atlas asked for a lot of commitment. To get an assistant next to your tabs, you adopted a new browser, moved your bookmarks and logins into it, and tied the whole arrangement to one vendor's product decisions. The product did not survive its first year, and the moving costs now fall on the people who committed.
It helps to separate the two things Atlas bundled: the browser and the assistant. Browsers are a solved problem, and the one you left will take you back without complaint. The assistant is the part worth choosing carefully, and the shutdown is a natural moment to look at the best ChatGPT alternatives before you settle back into a default.
MultiChats is built for that second look: 25+ models including GPT, Claude, and Gemini in one app, switching between them mid-conversation, and web search with citations on paid plans. Your chats live in your account and follow you between web and mobile, whatever browser you open them in. If part of Atlas's appeal was an AI that could see the web, a chat app with proper web search covers most of it, with no new browser to move into. And if you mainly want to know what a ChatGPT alternative should offer before you commit to one, we have written that up too.
Whatever you pick next, do the bookmark export before August 9. After that, Atlas may not even open.