Google this week confirmed that this year’s surge in Chrome vulnerabilities has been driven by the use of AI.
The increase in Chrome bugs started in April and has continued throughout July, with the latest browser release containing 370 security fixes and bringing the total number of bugs patched this year to over 1,800.
Google patched 1,072 security defects with the Chrome 149 and 150 releases, “surpassing the total number of security bugs fixed across the prior 23 milestones combined.”
This was the result of using an agent harness that leverages Gemini to identify security flaws across Chrome’s codebase with increased efficiency, the internet giant says.
What validated the AI-powered vulnerability detection, Google says, was the discovery of a sandbox escape that lurked in the browser for 13 years.
Tracked as CVE-2026-3545 (CVSS score of 9.8) and patched in early May in Chrome 145, the issue could have allowed “a compromised renderer to trick the browser into reading local files,” it says.
Described as an insufficient data validation in Navigation, the vulnerability could have been exploited via crafted HTML pages to perform a sandbox escape.
The Chrome Security team started using LLMs in 2023, but it was the agent harness built in early 2026 that has been essential to finding and patching more flaws in the browser.
It has support for model interoperability, was trained on a knowledge base of previously identified CVEs and of Chrome’s entire Git history, leverages developer-supplied SECURITY.md files that are consumed by a “critic” agent, and can run vulnerability-finding models over the codebase multiple times.
“We’ve built all of this with safety in mind, and have put in place guardrails to mitigate the risk of AI behaving unexpectedly. Our AI analyzes source code strictly at rest, operating on locked-down machines that lack general internet access,” Google explains.
While also relying on AI for bug validation, triaging, and patch generation, the internet giant continues to use other security testing infrastructure for bug detection, and welcomes researchers submitting vulnerability reports through its VRP.
“At this point, we have LLMs generating candidate fixes for most vulnerabilities, dramatically increasing the rate of security fixes in recent Chrome releases,” Google says.
Additionally, the company is relying on AI to prevent new security bugs by identifying and eliminating them “as close to code submit-time as possible” and by neutralizing issues in the tree that could impact code deemed safe in isolation.
Reducing the patch gap and eliminating memory safety bugs
To reduce the patch gap, Google is also piloting a twice-a-week Chrome security release cadence, which will complement the two-week schedule for major Chrome releases that was announced in March.
“We are working on automating the generation of release notes and CVE descriptions from security bug fixes to eliminate manual bottlenecks and shorten the window between vulnerability discovery and public disclosure,” the company says.
Google is also working on ensuring that Chrome is always up to date on users’ machines, through dynamic patching, which eliminates the need to restart the browser when applying updates, seamless session restoration, and restarts while in a windowless state (the application runs in the background while all windows are closed).
Additionally, Google is working on eliminating entire classes of security issues from Chrome, such as memory safety flaws. For that, it is hardening the runtime environment to squash C++ bugs, and is transitioning to memory-safe languages.
In this regard, it is expanding MiraclePtr to more libraries and deploying MiracleObject to the GPU main thread to neutralize use-after-free defects. In addition, it’s taking a ‘spanification’ effort to eliminate out-of-bounds weaknesses, and is integrating memory allocation protections to block integer overflows.
In the long term, Google is transitioning Chrome’s codebase to memory-safe languages like Rust, through building a centralized Rust SDK, deploying Rust to replace most flawed code segments, and writing new modular components in Rust.
“In addition to Rust, we are also exploring options like implementing the browser’s top-level user interface using HTML, CSS, and TypeScript to further reduce dependencies on traditional C++ frameworks,” Google notes.
According to the company, keeping the open source software ecosystem secure is another critical aspect of improving Chrome users’ protections. It has been using automated vulnerability scanning pipelines to keep dependencies patched and will move all Chrome third-party dependencies onto automated update pipelines.
“Every bug found and fixed is one less foothold for an attacker. But discovering and fixing a bug is only half the battle — we must also ship the fix and apply the update for users faster than adversaries can exploit the bug, and invest in projects that mitigate or eliminate classes of bugs through accelerated release cadences, dynamic patching, and opportune restarts, we are driving toward a browser that is continuously protected without disrupting the user,” Google notes.
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