Xbow spent $40K on AI and cracked Google Chrome wide open

What happened

Researchers at Xbow USA worked for six days on developing the exploit , which earned them a $250,000 bug bounty from Google, the first under the new 2026 rules . They chose OpenAI’s GPT-5 (large language model by OpenAI).6 Sol for the task to demonstrate what’s possible with a publicly available model rather than a specialist security implementation. Google is an Internet and software company based in Mountain View, and its products and services include Google Search.

They successfully chained together a vulnerability to escape first from the sandbox containing the V8 JavaScript (high-level programming language) engine and then from Chrome’s operating-system process sandbox, launching a Windows app from within a malicious web page. A chain of vulnerabilities in Google’s Chrome browser could have enabled researchers to take control of one billion Windows machines worldwide — and it cost them just $40,000 in AI compute time to discover it.

They used it to search Chrome’s source code, test ideas, and build proofs of concept, while they set the strategy, chose where to look, and checked its work. Xbow presented its findings to Google, which fixed the flaws.