Google shipped the Prompt API in Chrome 148 on May 5, 2026. Mozilla objected. Apple's WebKit team objected. The W3C TAG objected. Microsoft Edge disabled the feature entirely despite running on the same Chromium engine. It was, by any measure, one of the most contested browser feature launches in recent memory.
And it doesn't matter. Google has already won this one.
What Actually Happened
Chrome 148 quietly gave every website on earth the ability to run AI inference locally (text generation, summarization, classification, image captioning) by talking to Gemini Nano, a 4GB model that Chrome now ships to users' devices without asking. The API is dead simple:
const session = await self.ai.languageModel.create({ systemPrompt });
