I read that Anthropic will pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in a cloud deal, and my first reaction was petty: that’s a hell of a lot of money to spend on being nearby. Akamai has sold proximity for about twenty-five years, with servers tucked into thousands of networks so the bytes have a shorter trip, and I assume that’s a big part of what Anthropic is buying. But I kept thinking about the browser agent in my Chrome side panel. It’s already about as close to me as software can get.

I don’t know exactly which workloads Anthropic plans to run on Akamai. The coverage I’ve seen is heavy on the dollar figure and light on architecture, so I’ll leave that part alone.

Distance is the wrong thing to measure

For a chatbot, cutting 40 milliseconds off a round trip matters. For browser work it barely registers, because the network hop to the model was never the slow part of a browser task. The slow part is everything that has to be true before the model can do anything useful: the right account, the right cookies, the right tab, and a site that believes you’re a person.

An edge node in Frankfurt has none of that, and neither does a datacenter in Virginia. The Chrome window on my laptop has all of it. It’s been open since Monday.

The rebuild, step by painful step

Before a cloud or edge browser agent can start the task you asked for, it has to rebuild you. The list is longer than a slick demo suggests.

It starts by booting a fresh Chrome profile with no history, no extensions, no saved logins, and none of the cookies from the time you clicked “remember this device” on your bank’s site. I went into this in more detail in cloud browser agents boot a second Chrome, and I still think it’s the original sin of the category.

Then it has to log in. Sometimes that means typing your password into a remote browser that’s streamed back to you as video, which feels like signing a lease through a mail slot. Sometimes 2FA sends a code to a phone the datacenter doesn’t have, so you get pulled back in anyway. If your company uses Okta, add another round.

Next, the site gets suspicious. Datacenter IP ranges are well known, and Cloudflare’s bot checks, like most services of that kind, treat them with a suspicion that a home connection with years of ordinary browsing behind it almost never triggers (we’ve written about that too). So the agent sits there clicking a Turnstile box while you watch a progress spinner.

The part that bothers me most comes last. To avoid logging in every time, a lot of these services ask you to upload or sync your session cookies so the remote browser can pick up where you left off. That puts your authenticated identity for Gmail, your CRM, and maybe your bank on someone else’s disk. Maybe they encrypt it beautifully. I’d still rather it never left.

What actually leaves my laptop

dassi runs in Chrome’s side panel, inside the browser I’m already signed into. It reads the page I’m on, clicks and types in my real tabs, and uses my existing session because it is the same session. Nothing has to be rebuilt.

Only the model call goes over the network, and I pick where it goes. I can bring my own key for Claude, GPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek, or I can log in with my ChatGPT subscription and skip the key entirely. The page context goes to that provider and comes back. My cookies stay put, because dassi never needs them anywhere else.

So there’s a funny twist here. If Anthropic’s Akamai capacity ends up serving Claude calls, dassi users benefit too. The model moves closer to me, and the browser was already here.

Okay, the cloud wins two fights

I don’t think either one is close.

Long unattended jobs are the first. If a task means six hours of monitoring overnight, my laptop is a lousy host: it sleeps, the lid closes, and the café Wi-Fi drops. A server just keeps going. And parallel scale is the second. Want to check 400 supplier portals at once? A cloud fleet can spin up 400 browsers, while I have exactly one, good for maybe a dozen tabs before the fan starts sounding like a hair dryer.

Public pages that don’t need a login also take away most of the cloud’s handicap. Bot detection still bites, but there’s no identity to rebuild. For the rest of my browser work, the logged-in stuff I do on a Tuesday afternoon, I’d rather run the agent where I already am.

Seven years, though

Seven years is a long contract in a field where the list of top models changes every quarter. I have no idea what the edge will look like in 2033.

I’m fairly confident my Gmail tab will still be open.