Designing the Built-in AI Web APIs | Domenic Denicola
August 28, 2025
For the last year, I’ve been working as part of the Chrome built-in AI team on a set of APIs to bring various AI models to the web browser. As with all APIs we ship, our goal is to make these APIs compelling enough that other browsers adopt them, and they become part of the web’s standard library.
Working in such a fast-moving space brings tension with the usual process for building web APIs. When exposing other platform capabilities like USB, payments, or codecs, we can draw on years or decades of work in native platforms. But with built-in AI APIs, especially for language model-backed APIs like the prompt API, our precedent is barely two years old. Moreover, there are interesting differences between HTTP APIs and client-side APIs, and between vendor-specific APIs and those designed for a wide range of possible future implementations.
In what follows, I’ll focus mostly on the design of the prompt API, as it has the most complex API surface. But I’ll also touch on higher-level “task-based” APIs like summarizer, translator, and language detector.
Source: Designing the Built-in AI Web APIs | Domenic Denicola
Dominic de Nicola here looks at the development of new APIs in the browser. Specifically, AI-related APIs in Chrome. This is an area we have a lot of interest in, as we see on-device inference as being a way of making the browser a first-class citizen when it comes to Generative AI, and of addressing some of the environmental impacts and privacy concerns people have with generative AI.
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