On a Thursday in late August 2026, Anthropic introduced Browser Use, a tool that grants its Claude model a more principled way of reading and acting upon the web — not by guessing at pixels on a screen, but by consulting the same structured map of a page that assistive technologies have long relied upon. The shift is modest in appearance yet significant in kind: it moves AI web interaction from visual approximation toward something closer to genuine comprehension of structure. In doing so, it raises the enduring question of whether better tools make us more capable, or simply more dependent on