Google paid $17.1 million to 747 security researchers in 2025. The total is the highest in the Vulnerability Reward Program's 15-year history, up 45% from $11.8 million in 2024. Cumulative VRP disbursements since 2010 now stand at $81.6 million.
Chrome led all categories at $3.7 million across 100+ reporters. The top Chrome hunter earned $811,000 in 2025. Google Cloud followed at $3.57 million from 143 analysts who filed 1,774 security reports. Android and Google Devices accounted for $2.9 million.
Researcher Micky earned the largest single award of 2025. Google paid $250,000 for CVE-2025-4609, a sandbox escape in Chrome's Mojo IPC system. The bug let a compromised renderer duplicate a privileged browser-process handle and run system commands.
Micky's proof-of-concept achieved 70-80% reliability for command execution.
Google praised the work in an internal message to Micky. The submission was "a very complex logic bug" with "a functional exploit." Micky filed the flaw on April 22, 2025. Chrome 136 patched it in May.
CVE-2025-2783 inspired Micky's research. The TaxOff APT used that Mojo zero-day against Russian targets in March 2025. CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
Google launched a dedicated AI VRP in October 2025. The new track covers data theft without user approval, rogue model behavior, and unauthorized server-side feature enabling in products like Gemini Apps and AI Studio. Jailbreaks and alignment issues fall outside its scope. AI-related findings totaled $890,000 in the first operational period.
A single AI bugSWAT event generated 70 valid findings worth $400,000.
Live-hacking sessions in Sunnyvale, Las Vegas, and Mexico City produced nearly $3 million combined. That sum equals roughly 20% of the entire annual output. Google praised a firmware specialist named "lovepink" whose Android submission bypassed multiple defense layers to compromise the kernel from the GPU.
The 2025 surge reverses two years of stagnation. Disbursements peaked at $12 million in 2022, dropped to $10 million in 2023, and recovered to $11.8 million in 2024. Then the number jumped 45%. The inflection point was a July 2024 restructuring that raised Chrome's ceiling from roughly $100,000 to $250,000 and Mobile VRP's limit to $300,000.
Average per-hunter earnings rose 34%, from $17,100 to $22,891. Headcount grew only 13%. Google is concentrating more value on fewer high-impact findings.
Google's $250,000 Chrome ceiling is half of what Zerodium offers on the broker market for the same class of bug ($500,000 for Chrome RCE + sandbox escape). For iOS full-chain zero-click exploits, Zerodium lists $2 million. The persistent price gap means the highest-tier hunters still face a financial pull toward gray-market sales.
— Adam Bream, AnonHaven Editorial Team.
Apple doubled its top tier to $2 million in October 2025. The new maximum targets exploit chains comparable to mercenary spyware. Bonuses for Lockdown Mode bypasses push Apple's theoretical cap past $5 million. Apple has disbursed $35 million since 2020 to over 800 bug hunters. Microsoft's MSRC offers up to $250,000 with $60 million+ total. Meta caps its offering at $300,000 with $25 million paid since 2011.
Google highlighted V8 engine sandbox protections and memory safety improvements as direct outcomes of Chrome VRP research. AI-related categories were added to the Chrome track during 2025. Google created a separate track for OSV-SCALIBR, an open-source tool that detects flaws in software dependencies.
The $17.1 million validates Google's July 2024 decision to raise ceilings. The $250,000 Chrome sandbox escape, never paid at that level before, is the proof point. With the AI VRP at $890,000 in year one, the 2026 numbers will show whether that figure was a floor or a cap.
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