Ai2 releases open-source web agent to rival closed systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic

The Allen Institute for AI is releasing an open-source web agent that can navigate and complete tasks in a browser — letting developers look under the hood to understand what’s happening in ways not possible with closed systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

The nonprofit Seattle-based institute’s new agent, MolmoWeb, is built on Ai2’s Molmo 2 multimodal model family. It works by interpreting screenshots of webpages the way a person would, rather than relying on underlying page code, then deciding and executing actions like clicking, typing, and scrolling to complete a task.

The release Tuesday comes at a time of transition for Ai2, with CEO Ali Farhadi and key researchers departing for Microsoft, where they are joining Mustafa Suleyman’s Superintelligence team. Ai2’s primary funder is shifting its focus away from model training toward real-world applications of AI, though all of Ai2’s programs for 2026 are fully funded.

Major tech companies are racing to build AI agents capable of navigating computers and the web on behalf of users. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have all released their own web or computer-use agents in recent months. 

Anthropic recently acquired Seattle-based startup Vercept, founded by Ai2 veterans, which was building similar screen-understanding agentic technology for Macs and PCs.

“In many ways, web agents today are where LLMs were before Olmo — the community needs an open foundation to build on,” Ai2 says in a blog post, referring to its open large language model project that has served as a counterpoint to closed models from OpenAI and others.

MolmoWeb comes in two sizes, 4B and 8B parameters. Ai2 says the models posted strong benchmark results, with the 8B version outperforming agents built on much larger proprietary models including GPT-4o on key web navigation tasks, according to the institute. 

It’s available through Hugging Face and GitHub, along with a demo for testing the agent on a set of supported websites. Read more in this Ai2 post.