Chrome patches exploited V8 zero-day that hits AI browser agents
The sixth Chrome zero-day of 2026 is already exploited in the wild — and any agent driving Chromium inherits the hole until every browser is relaunched.
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The bug: a V8 type confusion
CVE-2026-85046 is a type-confusion flaw in Chrome's V8 engine — an array typed PACKED_ELEMENTS receives the PACKED_SMI_ELEMENTS map, handing an attacker arbitrary read/write on the JavaScript heap and a route out of the sandbox. It rates CVSS 8.8, and Google confirms an exploit already exists in the wild.
The fix: relaunch to 152.0.7977.82
Patched builds are 152.0.7977.82 on Linux and .82/.83 on Windows and macOS. Open More > Help > About Google Chrome and hit Relaunch. Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and every other Chromium browser need the same update.
Why your agents inherit it
Anything that ships Chromium runs the same V8: computer-use agents like Claude, Codex and Cursor, Playwright and Puppeteer automation, and Electron apps. An agent that renders an attacker-controlled page mid-run can be pushed out of the sandbox, so pin your automation and CI browser images to the patched build before the next headless job.
Chrome's sixth zero-day of 2026
This is the sixth actively-exploited Chrome zero-day patched this year, following CVE-2026-2441, -3909, -3910, -5281 and -11645. If auto-update is disabled on any machine running browser agents, that's the setting to flip today.
CISA's clock: patch by Sept 18
CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on Sept 4, giving federal agencies until Sept 18 — a reasonable deadline for your own fleet too. Researcher Salvatore Gulizia reported the bug on Aug 4 for a $1,000 bounty.