The Web Is Becoming AI’s Interface Layer

There's been a quiet inversion happening in internet technology: after a decade of smartphone apps dominance, the web is becoming the default interface layer again. Of course, this time it's for AI.

I know many of you continue to be skeptical of AI and what it's doing to the open web (as I am too), but one thing we can hang onto is that web technology is a key part of the emerging AI stack. Consider: Google is baking AI directly into Chrome and Search, OpenAI is embedding web apps inside ChatGPT, and protocols like MCP-UI are standardizing how agents render web-based UIs. The web layer is where humans meet machines.

For developers, that means the skills of the open web — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and frameworks like Vue and React — are becoming the building blocks of AI experiences.

For platforms, the real contest is the web layer — where AI meets the user. Google might still have the lead, but ChatGPT is a big player now and its newly announced app platform (Apps SDK) could well be a masterstroke. Plus, as you'll see below, Anthropic seems to be leading the charge on bridging technologies between AI and the Web — first with MCP, now with Skills.

p.s. slight formatting change this week; from now on I'm using the 💡 emoji to indicate my thoughts on a news item.

Web Platform Opportunities

🌎 "React isn’t competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform." Paul Kinlan, Google Chrome engineer, in a thoughtful blog post about what AI is doing to the web framework ecosystem. In short, making React even more popular!

💡 React’s dominance might be making it the de facto interface layer for AI-driven web apps. I don't actually like that trend, because I'd rather AI coding tools lean more towards native Web APIs. But, React does seem to be in an enviable position in terms of LLM 'knowledge'. Let's not call it a platform though!

🌎 At a frontend conference this month, Joeri Sebrechts showed how to port React applications to vanilla JavaScript. "It is a thing that pretty much nobody does for real but that is eminently doable," he said on Mastodon. Joeri posted his slides, which are worth perusing.

💡 Now we're talking! Joeri Sebrechts’ demo is a reminder that AI-assisted dev tools can abstract away frameworks entirely...if prompted to.

🌎 This week on The New Stack, I wrote about the launch of Vite+, a new unified JavaScript toolchain that aims to solve JavaScript fragmentation. The article includes quotes from my recent interview with Vite and Vue creator Evan You.

💡 Vite+ aims to unify the scattered JavaScript toolchain — timely, as human devs and AI coding agents alike thrive on consistent build environments.

🌎 The Web Components framework Lit is joining the OpenJS Foundation as an Impact Project, the project announced this week.

💡 Lit joining the OpenJS Foundation helps position Web Components as a long-term standard. For businesses, that’s hopefully an encouraging sign to use WCs.

🌎 Bramus from the Google Chrome team posted about what's new in view transitions, a new CSS feature that enables smooth animation between pages. MDN has a good overview.

💡 The smooth navigation of View Transitions closes one of the last UX gaps between web apps and native apps — another quiet win for the browser.

AI x Web: Emerging Strategies

🤖 Anthropic has introduced "Agent Skills", which it defines as "folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed." The engineering blog adds:

"Skills extend Claude’s capabilities by packaging your expertise into composable resources for Claude, transforming general-purpose agents into specialized agents that fit your needs."

Simon Willison thinks Skills could become even more important than MCP, which has arguably been the AI trend of the year (well, other than agents):

"I expect we’ll see a Cambrian explosion in Skills which will make this year’s MCP rush look pedestrian by comparison."

🤖 Cloudflare has updated Web Bot Auth, a protocol that "allows bots and agents to verify their identities to other parties using HTTP message signatures," and it is being extended for agentic commerce. Cloudflare provides the security infrastructure, while Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are all utilizing Web Bot Auth in their agentic commerce programs, says the company.

💡 Payments players like Visa and Mastercard validating Cloudflare's protocol shows AI agent commerce is getting real. But, as noted last week, OpenAI and Shopify are also very active in this space — lots to work through yet.

🤖 Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting spoke to Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen about the company's efforts to help publishers in the AI era. The goal is the Spotify model, Cohen told Morrissey. “There’s lots of money going to creators in that model… it took a while for that market to develop,” she said.

💡 Cloudflare’s “Spotify model” for publishers hints at a future where AI platforms pay for licensed content access. That's the goal anyway, and I support it! Love the work Cloudflare is doing on this front.

🤖 The Google Chrome team hosted an "AI in Action" technical workshop, to "demonstrate how client-side AI and built-in AI APIs can be directly integrated into their products..."

💡 Chrome’s client-side AI push positions the browser as a local inference engine, not just a viewer — but we'll have to see how that affects web performance and privacy. I notice Firefox is pushing similar technology.

🤖 Google Chrome also invites you to check out "the new Chrome DevTools Model Context Protocol (MCP) server," which it says "brings the power of Chrome DevTools to AI coding assistants."

🤖 Vercel has more details about running Next.js inside ChatGPT:

"When OpenAI announced the Apps SDK with Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, it opened the door to embedding web applications directly into ChatGPT. But there's a significant difference between serving static HTML in an iframe and running a full Next.js application with client-side navigation, React Server Components, and dynamic routing. This is the story of how we bridged that gap."

💡 Vercel’s Next.js-in-ChatGPT integration shows that JS frameworks can run inside AI chat interfaces. If the ChatGPT apps platform does take off, Vercel wants to position itself as a dev environment for those apps.

🤖 Interesting Fortune article about the 2025 trend for AI browsers. This about sums it up:

"The real prize for these companies isn’t web navigation; it’s control of the gateway to the rest of users’ digital lives, including a lot of other web-based software applications. Most companies are betting that the true value of AI will be unlocked when AI agents have access to a user’s entire ecosystem—emails, calendar, messages, and documents—and can perform tasks across them seamlessly."

💡 This feels like Google's battle to win or lose, given the current dominance of Chrome (and its hold on Chromium), and the fact OpenAI seems to have pivoted to ChatGPT as the platform for apps (it had previously been rumored to be working on a browser). Still, there could be other winners here — Atlassian owns Dia now, one of these new AI browsers, so maybe that becomes a leading browser technology for enterprise AI apps.

Open Social Business

🦣 Why the open social web matters now; Ben Werdmuller posts the video and slides of his excellent FediForum keynote.

🦋 Leaflet, the blogging product running on AT Protocol, has a new Discover page showing off all the people using it. Accordingly, I subscribed to a bunch of leaflets; the process is a little confusing at first, but once you realize that you get a custom Bluesky feed of the sites you subscribe to (labelled "Leaflet Reader"), it makes sense! You can also read your feeds in Leaflet's product.

💡 Leaflet’s new Discover page shows early signs of a decentralized content network forming on Bluesky’s protocol — small, messy, but growing.

🎸 Music dev Lee Martin has a post about Spotify's new API restrictions and finding practical alternatives. He explains on Hacker News:

"A lot has changed on the Spotify Web API in the past year: deprecated features, increased security, and steep new criteria for extended access, which alienates indie apps. Rather than complain about it, I've put together a report to understand these new restrictions and find practical alternatives."

💡 Spotify’s tightening API access mirrors a pattern: when platforms mature, indie innovation gets squeezed. Open standards are the only long-term defense.

One More Thing

🎈 The political blog Talking Points Memo turns 25 shortly, and to celebrate it is running a series of posts on the history of digital media. I really enjoyed a post by Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker.com, entitled What Made Blogging Different?. This bit near the end especially resonated with me:

“I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.”

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Feature image via Unsplash.