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TBPN · 5 min · Oct 13, 2026

One researcher plus AI agents found a Chrome full-chain exploit in 6 days

Oege de Moor

Founder & CEO, XBOW

Former Oxford professor who sold Semmle to GitHub, then created GitHub's Copilot and Advanced Security products.

  • John CooganHost · Co-host, TBPN

    Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.

  • Jordi HaysHost · Co-host, TBPN

    Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.

About this segment

XBOW's CEO says one researcher with an agent swarm on a public model found a one-click Chrome takeover in six days for about $40,000. Agency teams reportedly need around six months for this kind of work.

From “Muse Wonder, Anjney Sizes Up, Neal Stephenson Joins, Social Reckoning Review, Eli Manning Live”, Oct 13, 2026. Watch the full episode

“What that means is that you just point your web browser at one malicious website, and the attacker will own your entire Windows PC.”
Oege de Moorat 2:00:37 · TBPN2:00:37

Takeaways

  1. The exploit took over a full Windows PC from a single malicious web page visit
  2. It took six days and about $40,000 of compute on a publicly released model
  3. Google paid its maximum bounty of $250,000 for the bug
Watch 5:04 from 2:00:08

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 2:00:08One researcher plus AI agents found a Chrome full-chain exploit in 6 days5:04

  2. 54:13How pooled compute lets startups and public users share GPU capacity4:41Up next
  3. 2:19:56Why micro machines are an unserved manufacturing space2:44

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

  1. 2:00:15

    XBO is a company that automates security research. So it does the work of an offensive security researcher. You point it at a target and it will report the vulnerabilities it finds working like a human expert. Yeah. Now, today, we are announcing a particular vulnerability found by OG. A full chain vulnerability in Chrome. Okay. What that means is that you just point your web browser at one malicious website, and the attacker will own your entire Windows PC. Okay. Your email, bank account, passwords, key... Keystrokes, and so this vulnerability affects a billion users. Wow.

  2. 2:01:03

    Google Google acknowledged the problem, paid their maximum bounty. But what's really interesting is that it only took six days. Okay. Six days by a very skilled security researcher. Yeah. It was joined by a swarm of agents. Sure. That makes sense.

  3. 2:01:23

    Yeah. And the other the other thing that's notable is, like, you know, finding this this exploit that that would impact a billion users in a very meaningful way. And and congratulations. Your prize money is $250,000, which

  4. 2:01:37

    Yeah. Do prize monies need to go way up so you can offset compute? I don't know what you spend. I don't know if you want to share, but I've heard of, like, million dollar agent swarm runs, essentially prompts that wind up working for days of wall clock time, and they're burning GPUs for hours and hours. And it feels like it can get expensive. But the value of catching these bugs is so high, especially right now that should companies be spending more on these, like, white hat bounties?

  5. 2:02:08

    So definitely, everyone should get their defenses up. But, no, it was not that expensive. Okay. We used an off the shelf model, a GBT five six Soul. Wow. And it only cost $40,000.

  6. 2:02:23

    Okay. Wow. Yeah. And and so how how how integrated are you with OpenAI to be able to do offensive cybersecurity testing? Do you need to get whitelisted with them in some way to to actually be able to run prompts that might get rejected just by the default ChatGPT front end?

  7. 2:02:46

    So OpenAI are great partners of ours, as are all of the other front end apps. Yeah. In this case, it was a publicly released model, but we are part of daybreak, and Yeah. Of course, we also got to got to play with the restricted models. Yeah. However, we really wanted to make the point here that it's possible to do with a publicly available model. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

  8. 2:03:09

    So, yeah, break break this down a little bit more because because... So so the browser, like, you would simply have to navigate and land on the website. You don't need to you wouldn't need to to download anything or run any software. It's literally just you land on it and it's over for you. Is that is that generally correct?

  9. 2:03:27

    That's exactly right. So this this type of bug in Chrome is really really hard to find. Every major security intelligence agency in the world has a team of people doing this kind of thing, and some of my contacts have been telling me that it takes months, something like six months to do this with a team of people. Yeah. And this time, it was done in just six days by one person. I mean, not really building on our previous experience that he had gathered with his with his with his colleague.

  10. 2:04:04

    Yeah. When you find an exploit like this, does it ever go through your head like maybe somebody would have found this before but wouldn't have the incentive to share it publicly or obviously they Yeah. Like a malicious actor could make a lot more than $250,000, like, exploiting this, then... And and so it begs the question, yeah, was this already being abused for a while?

  11. 2:04:34

    So we have no evidence of that. I don't know for sure, but don't know whether someone else has found this particular bug before. But what the story does tell you is that everybody really has to get their defenses in order. Cybersecurity is now right at the top of what everyone needs to be worried about. Take action. Find the bugs before the bad guys do. Mhmm.