I Stumbled Onto Hark Pro While Searching for Flights — the AI That Operates a Browser Like a Human

I set out to find one plane ticket and lost three hours

I was hunting for a flight to Jeju on a Saturday night.

An hour in, bouncing between five fare-comparison sites, an ad off to the side caught my eye. "Clicks the browser for you."

At first I figured it was just another one of those run-of-the-mill automation tools. But the name rang a bell. Handoff. I'd seen it somewhere recently, I thought.

So I ran one more search. From that point on, my Saturday night went somewhere entirely unrelated to airfare.

Turns out this wasn't just a crawler. It was the kind of thing that uses a computer the way a person does — reading screen coordinates, clicking, typing. And the person who built it was somewhat famous.

Start with the maker

Hark is an AI company founded in 2025. Headquartered in San Jose.

The founder is Brett Adcock. He's the guy behind the humanoid robot company Figure AI, and before that he did Archer Aviation, the electric aircraft company. If the name rings a bell, it's probably "oh, the robot guy."

This time it isn't robots. It's an AI that uses the internet on your behalf.

Handoff: the AI that uses a computer

Hark's core engine is called Handoff.

Here's how it works. When you tell it "do this for me," Hark spins up a dedicated virtual machine. Inside there's a browser, a file system, and a terminal. Then Handoff watches that screen, moves the mouse cursor, clicks by coordinate, types on the keyboard, and scrolls.

Where earlier automation needed a separate API wired up for every site, this one just reads and manipulates the screen that was built for humans. To the site, it looks like a person showed up.

According to Hark's own published material, 74.9% of computer use happens inside a browser, and fewer than one in a thousand sites offers a public API. In other words, the web is still built for human hands — and Handoff wants to take over the rest of it.

Hark says Handoff can run up to six browsers at once and log into hundreds of thousands of sites on your behalf. Outside the browser it connects directly to services like Google and Outlook via API, and pulls information through MCP, the standard for agent tool use.

The basis for "insane performance" — and the half of it that isn't proven

What made it blow up was the benchmark.

Hark announced that Handoff scored the highest on Online-Mind2Web (OM2W), a web-agent evaluation metric. The claim is that it beat comparison models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Token cost, they say, is under a tenth of competing products. Adcock wrote on X that input cost dropped 96% and output cost dropped 92%.

Now, a moment to sober up here.

These numbers come from the company itself. As outside reviewers have pointed out, two of the three evaluations were run in Hark's own environment, so calling it independent verification is a stretch. OM2W is a genuine public benchmark, sure, but that doesn't guarantee it'll succeed at that rate with your account and your payment method.

That the direction is impressive and that the numbers are validated are two different claims.

But this is out as an app now: Hark Pro

While digging around I found something interesting. This computer agent isn't confined to the lab — it shipped as a general app on October 6, 2026. It's called Hark Pro.

It works on iPhone, Android, and the web. The makers call it "the operating system for your life." A bit grandiose, but when you actually take the components apart there are three chunks.

First is Handoff — your own dedicated computer. Second is memory. It remembers what you've said and what you prefer. From "I hate mayonnaise and I like window seats" all the way to your document-formatting preferences, it stores them and applies them in the next conversation. Ask it to forget, of course, and it forgets. Third is proactive thinking. Without being asked, it handles the next thing you're going to need.

For instance, if you book movie tickets, it doesn't stop at the tickets. It looks up nearby parking, suggests a reservation, and sends you the QR code for entry. It even staggers the messages so you're not fighting traffic.

Taking the actual features apart

Inside the app you'll find:

• Action Buttons: the evolution of notifications. Tap phrases like "pay bill" or "cancel subscription" and it's done. No reading the notification, no logging into the site, no clicking around again yourself.
• Panels: custom mini-apps built from the accounts you've connected. Strava workout data, Netflix new releases cross-referenced with Rotten Tomatoes scores, school grade alerts — collected on one screen. You can ask questions about them after they're built.
• Projects: dedicated threads for work that takes weeks or months. Event prep, tracking a single topic. Each keeps its own files.
• Home: a live sky that changes with the weather and time of day. Not a feature, more a mood, but honestly it's pretty.

What about security

This thing moves money and handles passwords, so this part is unavoidable.

Hark built its own encrypted vault called Secured by Hark. Credit cards and passwords go in there. The interesting part: they say even the company can't see inside it. Same when you type a password into a website. It travels encrypted from vault to site, and the company can't read the value.

They say they don't sell your data, don't share it with advertisers, and you can delete it anytime. That's the company's promise, though, so how much you trust it is your call.

The pricing is simpler than I expected

This one surprised me.

The core features are all free. The company says good technology should be open to everyone and it intends to keep the basics free.

Pay money and you get more usage. $20 a month doubles it, $100 a month gets you ten times. A ladder you've seen before, and yes — Meta's Muse, launched four weeks ago, is priced identically: free, $20, $100.

Company scale and what's coming

Hark raised $700 million in May 2026. Valuation: $6 billion. NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures came in, and Adcock put $100 million of his own money in first.

Hardware lands in 2027. The design lead is Avi Chaudhary, who ran iPhone Air at Apple. He's said he doesn't trust camera-equipped glasses or clothing pins, and wants to build a portable device you can use at home and at work. AT&T handles the connectivity.

The competitive landscape is interesting too. Meta already shipped an agent at the same price points, and OpenAI has a $300 speaker designed by the Jony Ive studio in the works for 2027. The software war has already started; on hardware nobody has seen a physical product yet.

So, is it worth using?

Honestly, I'm still only half sure.

The upside is real. Gather quotes across different sites, compare airlines — the kinds of things that were blocked because there's no API — those genuinely get unblocked. There's also a clear sense of "this is only going to get easier."

But there's plenty to hold back on.

One, the benchmarks are the company's own. Two, for something that autonomously runs payments, there's the risk of falling for instructions planted on a malicious page. NIST has said that in an agent-security competition, every model tested was hijacked successfully at least once. Three, whether it even works in Europe is still unclear. Europe's payment-authorization rules are written for humans, which makes a piece of software paying on your behalf awkward.

And nobody outside the company has seen the hardware yet.

If you want to try it

Hark Pro works right now.

• iPhone App Store: Hark Pro
• Google Play: Hark Pro
• Web: hark.com

Start free, and if you run out of usage, move up to the $20 or $100 tier. Sign up, connect your accounts, and your own dedicated computer starts running in the background.

Wrapping up

That Jeju flight, in the end, I booked by hand. The night was gone before I ever got around to handing it to an AI.

Still, this detour wasn't a waste. We've moved past the stage where "AI reads the web," and into the stage where "AI uses the web." An AI that clicks a browser like a person sounds like no big deal until you actually take it apart, and then it's a bigger deal than it sounds.

Right now it should be treated as hype mixed in with something real. But the fact that Brett Adcock is taking what he did with robots and doing it with the internet is a signal worth taking seriously when you think a few years out.