There’s a reliably annoying moment in setting up any browser agent. You point it at Gmail, it spins up, a Chrome window pops open, and the agent reports back that it can’t find your inbox because the page is asking it to sign in. You’re already signed in. You’ve been signed in for two years. So why is this thing staring at a login wall like it just arrived from a fresh OS install?

That blank, logged-out browser is the single most common setup snag I see people hit, and it almost always comes down to one misunderstanding: which browser the agent is actually controlling.

Managed browser, Relay, remote CDP — they are not the same thing

Most agent tools give you a few connection modes, and the names rarely explain what they do. Roughly there are three families. A managed browser is a fresh Chromium instance the tool launches and owns. A remote CDP connection drives a browser running somewhere else, often on a VPS, over the Chrome DevTools Protocol. And Browser Relay drives the actual Chrome you already have open on your machine, with your profile, your cookies, your sessions.

The managed browser is the default for a lot of tools because it’s the cleanest to ship. It’s isolated, it’s reproducible, it doesn’t touch your personal data. It is also a stranger to every site you use. It has never logged into your bank, your CRM, your Notion. When it opens Gmail, Gmail correctly treats it as an unknown machine and demands credentials, which is exactly the behavior you didn’t want.

We wrote a longer breakdown of these connection styles in Three Ways AI Agents Connect to Your Browser, but the short version is that the mode you pick decides whether the agent inherits your logins or starts from zero.

Why Relay points at your real profile

Browser Relay exists specifically because the logged-in problem is the whole game.

Your Chrome profile is not just a window. It’s a folder on disk holding cookies, session tokens, saved logins, and the small encrypted artifacts that prove to a thousand websites that you are you. When an agent runs through Relay, it borrows that profile instead of conjuring a sterile new one, which means the agent walks into Gmail already authenticated because it is, quite literally, using your authenticated session.

This is the difference between an agent that can read the page you’re looking at and one that can only read a login form. Dassi runs as a Chrome extension in your side panel for this reason: it lives inside the browser you already use, so there’s no second browser to log into and no session to recreate. The tab the agent sees is the tab you see.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Here’s where it goes sideways. People install an agent, leave it on managed-browser mode, and assume “open my Gmail” means my Gmail. It doesn’t. It means open Gmail in a browser that has never met you.

Then they try to fix it by logging into the managed browser once, which sort of works, until that throwaway instance gets recycled and the cookies evaporate and they’re back to square one the next morning. So they do it again. And again. I’ve watched someone log into the same managed Chrome four times in a week before realizing the browser was disposable by design and was never going to remember a damn thing.

The fix is not to keep re-authenticating the wrong browser. The fix is to stop using the wrong browser. Switch to Relay, or use a tool that runs against your real profile from the start, and the login wall just isn’t there anymore because you never left your own session.

One subtlety worth flagging, because it bites people who do set Relay up correctly and still get a logged-out window: Chrome can run multiple profiles, and if you’ve got a work profile and a personal profile, the agent will attach to whichever one Relay was configured against, which may not be the profile holding the login you actually need. If your agent opens a Chrome that’s logged into nothing, check whether it grabbed your “Person 2” profile instead of your default, because that mismatch produces the exact same blank-browser symptom as picking the wrong mode entirely, and it sends people chasing the connection settings when the real culprit is two folders over on disk. Picking the right profile is half the setup, and almost nobody mentions it.

A two-line checklist

Before you blame the agent: confirm the mode is Relay (or your real local Chrome), and confirm it’s pointed at the profile that’s actually logged in.

That’s it. Mode, then profile.

The reason this keeps happening

Cloud-first agents trained everyone to expect a separate browser somewhere else. We covered why that model breaks down in Cloud Browser Agents Can’t See Your Tabs, and the login problem is the most visible symptom of it. A browser on someone else’s server cannot inherit your local sessions, so it can’t help but show you a login screen.

Relay flips the default. Instead of moving your work to a browser that doesn’t know you, it brings the agent to the browser that already does. If you want to skip the mode-juggling entirely, Dassi just runs in the Chrome you’ve got open, with the profile you’re already using.

And once that blank-browser problem is gone, you mostly forget it was ever a thing. Until you set up the next tool and watch it open an empty Chrome, and the whole cycle starts over.