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

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 specia