VRP 2025 Year in Review

Google's Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP), which pays researchers to find security bugs in Google products, celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2025 by awarding over $17 million to more than 700 security researchers worldwide. Major 2025 developments included launching a dedicated AI VRP (a separate program focused specifically on AI security flaws), adding AI reward categories to Chrome VRP, and creating a patch rewards program for OSV-SCALIBR (an open source tool that scans software for vulnerabilities). Google also hosted multiple bugSWAT events (live hacking competitions) throughout the year, which generated hundreds of bug reports and distributed over $2.9 million in rewards.