The race of big technology companies for AI is leaving many corpses along the way and this Wednesday we met a new one, that of Project Marinerthe navigation agent with artificial intelligence that at the time was presented as the future of people’s interaction with the web.
Google DeepMind introduced Project Mariner in December 2024, when it launched Gemini 2.0 and announced other agentic prototypes such as Project Astraa universal multimodal assistant, and Julesan AI agent for programming, both still active.
As reported by Wired’s Maxwell Zeff, the Project Mariner home page now displays a message that reads the following. ‘Thank you for using Project Mariner. It was closed on May 4, 2026 and its technology traveled to other Google products‘. In March, there were already signs that Project Mariner was heading to Google’s notorious graveyard when the company reduced the team behind the project.
NEW: Google quietly shut down Project Mariner yesterday, the web-browsing AI agent it highlighted onstage last year at Google IO.
I reported for WIRED, nearly 2 months ago, that Google had moved staffers off the Project Mariner team as it responded to OpenClaw-style agents. pic.twitter.com/WMBago74vr
— Max Zeff (@ZeffMax) May 6, 2026
The idea with Project Mariner, initially known as Project Jarviswas that of an AI that could use the internet like a human user. Unlike basic chatbots that extract information from web pages, Mariner could navigate through Chromefill out forms, search for job offers or book trips on sites like Expedia. It achieved this by taking screenshots of the browser, recognizing buttons and text, and then clicking or typing for the user.
While the idea of an AI assistant browsing the web is appealing, it is a resource-intensive technology. These agents require great processing capacity to manage visual data in real timewhich can impact performance and cause errors such as incorrect option selection.
Another reason for the closure of Project Mariner is how artificial intelligence has evolved in this time. While Google worked on browser-based agents, new AI tools with agent capabilities, such as OpenClaw and Claude Codehave become more popular. These go beyond clicking links, as they can modify files, write complex code, and function as digital coworkers.
But even though Google has buried Project Mariner, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. Over the past year, the company has integrated Project Mariner-powered features into other AI tools, including Gemini Agentfor now available to subscribers of Google AI Ultra in USAwhich can do things like archive emails or help book a hotel. Google is also adding Project Mariner agentic capabilities to its AI search function, AI Mode.