Intro to Steel

Humans use Chrome, Agents use Steel.

Steel is an open-source browser API purpose-built for AI agents.

We want AI products that can book us a flight, find us a sublet, buy us a prom suit, and get us an interview.

But if you’ve ever tried to build an AI app that can interact with the web today, you know the headaches:

Dynamic Content: Modern sites heavily rely on client-side rendering and lazy loading, requiring scrapers to wait for page hydration and execute JS to access the full content.
Complex Navigation: Reaching desired data often involves multi-step flows, simulating user actions like clicks, typing, and handling CAPTCHAs.
Authentication: High-value data and functionality frequently sits behind auth walls, necessitating robust identity management and auto-login capabilities.
Infrastructure Overhead: Efficiently scaling and managing headless browser fleets is complex, with issues like cold starts, resource contention, and reliability eating up valuable dev cycles.
Lack of Web APIs: Many critical sites still lack API access, forcing teams to build and maintain brittle custom scrapers for each target.

This is by design. Most of the web is designed to be anti-bot and human friendly.

But what if we flipped that?

Steel is a headless browser API that lets AI engineers:

Control fleets of browser sessions in the cloud via API or Python/Node SDKs
Easily extract page data as cleaned HTML, markdown, PDFs, or screenshots
Access data behind logins with persistent cookies and automatic sign-in
Render complex client-side content with JavaScript execution
Bypass anti-bot measures with rotating proxies, stealth configs, and CAPTCHA solving
Reduce token usage and costs by up to 80% with optimized page formats
Reuse session and cookie data across multiple runs
Debug with ease using live session viewers, replays, and embeddings