Xbow spent $40K on AI and cracked Google Chrome wide open
Xbow used a public OpenAI model to chain Chrome sandbox escapes, earning a $250,000 Google bounty.
Xbow researchers spent about $40,000 and six days using OpenAI’s public GPT-5.6 Sol to search Chrome’s source, test ideas, and build proofs of concept. They chained an escape from the V8 JavaScript sandbox with an escape from Chrome’s OS-process sandbox, launching a Windows app from a malicious page—a path they said could have affected about one billion Windows machines. Google paid a $250,000 bounty under new 2026 rules and fixed the flaws. The article names no CVE IDs and does not report in-the-wild exploitation.
- Six-day effort cost about $40,000 in AI compute
- Public GPT-5.6 Sol used; researchers directed and checked the work
- Chain escaped the V8 and Chrome process sandboxes to launch a Windows app
- Google fixed the flaws and paid a $250,000 bounty
Full article185 words · extracted from csoonline.com · click to collapse
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.
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-5.6 Sol for the task to demonstrate what’s possible with a publicly available model rather than a specialist security implementation. 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.
They successfully chained together a vulnerability to escape first from the sandbox containing the V8 JavaScript engine and then from Chrome’s operating-system process sandbox, launching a Windows app from within a malicious web page.
Xbow presented its findings to Google, which fixed the flaws. The researchers set out all the details as to how the exploit was developed in a blog.
This article first appeared on Computerworld.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.csoonline.com/article/4236599/xbow-spent-40k-on-ai-and-cracked-google-chrome-wide-open-2.html