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Chrome 151 Ships 370 Fixes as Google Uses AI to Ramp Up Vulnerability Hunting

AI-powered agents have driven a surge in bug discovery, pushing Google to speed updates, test on-the-fly patching, and redesign risky C++ code for memory safety.

Overview

  • Google released Chrome 151 to the Stable channel on Wednesday, rolling out versions 151.0.7922.71/.72 for Windows and macOS and 151.0.7922.71 for Linux with 370 security fixes that include seven critical vulnerabilities.
  • The spike in fixes follows June’s Chrome 149 and 150 milestones, which together addressed 1,072 security bugs, a total Google says exceeds the number fixed across the prior 23 milestones combined.
  • Google now runs large language models and a Gemini-powered multi-agent harness across Chrome’s vulnerability lifecycle to find flaws, reproduce reports, assign severity, generate candidate patches, and write tests while operating on locked-down, offline machines and using critic agents to review outputs.
  • To shrink the window between a patch being published and users installing it, Google is piloting twice-weekly security releases, moving to a two-week major-release cadence with weekly security updates, and developing dynamic patching that would apply updates without a full browser restart.
  • Beyond faster fixes, Google is changing Chrome’s code and tooling to remove whole classes of memory-safety bugs by expanding MiraclePtr and MiracleObject, applying ‘spanification’ to catch out-of-bounds errors, migrating high-risk components to Rust, and automating dependency updates.