Google: AI Revolutionizes Bug Hunting in Chrome

Google: AI Revolutionizes Bug Hunting in Chrome

With the help of its internal AI tools, Google claims to have fixed more security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser over the past month than in the combined total of the last two years.

The tech giant announced on Thursday that it has addressed an impressive total of 1,072 security bugs in the last two versions of Chrome, both released in June. This surpasses the number of bugs fixed in the previous 23 versions released over the last two years, which totaled 1,036 fixes.

Since the advent of LLMs (large language models), cybersecurity experts have warned that AI-powered systems would discover an increasingly vast number of bugs, forcing defenders to also use AI to stay ahead of malicious hackers.

This prediction is beginning to come true, supported by concrete data.

A graph published by Google, featured in a white paper on the company's efforts to use AI to detect and fix vulnerabilities more quickly, illustrates this exponential increase. To provide context, Chrome version 126 was released in June 2024, while the last two versions, Chrome 149 and 150, were released last month. Google refers to each version as a "milestone."

Doug Turner, Chrome's engineering director, told TechCrunch in a statement that LLMs have "fundamentally changed the economics of cybersecurity, transforming vulnerability discovery into a large-scale automated operation."

"By applying models like Gemini, we are proactively fixing vulnerabilities, staying ahead of our adversaries, and making Chrome safer with each update," Turner said.

Google is not the only company observing this trend.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it had fixed a record number of 570 security vulnerabilities across its products as part of its monthly scheduled update cycle, commonly referred to as "Patch Tuesday." Microsoft cited its own use of AI to explain this sudden increase in bug fixes.

In contrast, Apple does not seem to be experiencing the same exponential increase. According to an independent count of bugs fixed in its products, Apple addressed 482 bugs in 2026, which is roughly on track to match or exceed the number of bugs fixed last year, and is also about equivalent to the number of bugs Apple had fixed in 2015.

TechCrunch reached out to Apple for comment but did not receive a response.