Kimi WebBridge Lets AI Agents Drive Your Browser—And Keep Your Data Local - Decrypt

Beijing-based Moonshot AI has released Kimi WebBridge, a browser extension that lets AI agents interact with websites the way a person would—searching, clicking, typing, scrolling, and extracting data—all while running locally on your device. It's available now on the Chrome Web Store and the official Kimi website.

Right now most AI browser automation pipes your data through cloud infrastructure, which means your logged-in sessions and private page content go with it.

But Kimi WebBridge does something different. It pairs a local background service with the browser extension, and the agent communicates with that local service using Chrome DevTools Protocol—the same low-level interface developers use for debugging. Everything stays on your machine. Your bank account, your email, your company's internal tools: the agent can interact with all of them without Moonshot ever seeing the content.

What the Kimi WebBridge actually does

Think of it as giving your AI agent hands inside your browser. The agent can open pages, click buttons, fill out forms, take screenshots to understand what it's looking at, read text from pages, and pass results back to whatever AI tool you're using. It's not a separate browser—it works in the Chrome or Edge window you already have open, with all your cookies and logins intact.

For example, you could ask your agent to browse Amazon for mechanical keyboards under $150 with at least 4.5 stars and return a ranked comparison, and it would understand your instruction and search the Amazon site visually instead of doing API calls. You could ask it to scan LinkedIn job listings across multiple searches and compile them into a spreadsheet, or check prices for the same product across 10 retailers and report back the best deal.

Any task that involves clicking through a website repeatedly—the stuff that takes 20 minutes of boring manual work—becomes a one-sentence prompt.

Kimi WebBridge officially supports Kimi Code CLI, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Hermes. So it's not locked to the Kimi ecosystem. If you already use another AI coding or agent tool, WebBridge plugs into it.

Kimi: The Chinese model US behemoths secretly love

WebBridge is powered by Moonshot AI's Kimi model family—built in China—and the underlying AI is more formidable than most Western users realize. Kimi K2 launched in July 2025 as a 1-trillion-parameter, open-source mixture-of-experts model ranking first among open-source models and fifth overall on the LMSYS Arena leaderboard. (Parameters are what determine a model’s breadth of knowledge, and more is generally better, but not always.)

The latest version, K2.6, released in April 2026, now scores 58.6% on SWE-Bench Pro—a benchmark measuring real-world software engineering on actual GitHub issues—putting it ahead of GPT-5.4 at 57.7% and Claude Opus 4.6 at 53.4%.

If you've never heard of Kimi before, there's a reason it landed on your radar in 2026: the Cursor controversy. On March 19, the $50 billion coding AI startup Cursor launched its Composer 2 model, marketing it as "frontier-level proprietary coding intelligence" built through "continued pretraining" and reinforcement learning.

The announcement lasted less than 24 hours before a developer named Fynn intercepted API traffic and found a model identifier: kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast. Elon Musk posted three words: "Yeah, it's Kimi 2.5." Moonshot's head of pretraining ran a tokenizer analysis. Identical match, confirmed.

Cursor VP of Developer Education Lee Robinson acknowledged the open-source base within hours, insisting roughly 75% of the compute went into Cursor's own training pipeline. Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger called the omission "a miss from the start." Moonshot, for its part, took the high road—officially congratulating Cursor.

Who else is in this space

Browser automation for AI agents is getting crowded. Anthropic's own computer use feature lets Claude interact with desktops. OpenAI's Operator and ChatGPT Atlas do similar things through a hosted cloud service. Google has DeepMind-powered agent experiments and Perplexity has its Comet Browser.

The difference with Kimi WebBridge—at least for now—is the local-first architecture. Cloud-based browser agents are convenient but require routing your browsing activity through a third party. For anything involving personal accounts or sensitive data, that's a real consideration.

If you want to install it, the fastest path to WebBridge is through the official setup page at kimi.com/features/webbridge, which walks through the steps in order.

Step 1: Download the Kimi Desktop App. The extension needs Kimi Claw Desktop, which runs locally. Mac download is available directly from the setup page; Windows users can install via PowerShell by running:

irm https://kimi-web-img.moonshot.cn/webbridge/install.ps1 | iex

Step 2: Install the browser extension from the Chrome Web Store, or manually through the setup page.

Step 3: Open the Kimi Desktop App, find Kimi Claw in the left sidebar, add a new Claw, and select "On my computer" to deploy it as a local agent. Then send a prompt—something like "Browse Amazon for a mechanical keyboard under $150 with 4.5+ stars"—and it goes to work.

For other AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex), the setup page provides a connection command you paste into your agent, which connects it to the WebBridge service automatically.

If the extension shows as disconnected, resend the connection command in Kimi Claw Desktop and restart the app. The most common issue is the local service not running before the extension tries to connect.

Moonshot says K2.6 supports up to 300 parallel sub-agents executing across 4,000 coordinated steps simultaneously—the architecture WebBridge taps into when handling complex, multi-step browser tasks.