Users of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex are finding their accounts restricted or blocked while attempting to reverse engineer consumer electronics. This crackdown targets activities such as unbricking internet-of-things devices, removing surveillance software from smart TVs, and replacing manufacturer operating systems with open-source alternatives.
Several people have reported triggering “safety checks” in Claude Code that prevented them from using AI to decompile software. A highly upvoted Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode states “The Dream is dead. Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is not likely to work with Claude.” A thread in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord from last week reads, “Claude is refusing to decompile anything,” with multiple users responding saying they have hit similar walls. X user log4j, who used OpenAI’s Codex to reverse engineer Samsung TVs, reported having their OpenAI account banned for violating its rules on “cyber abuse.” Other users said they asked Codex to reverse engineer hardware or their own code now say they have either been warned by the company or had their accounts restricted. A project called Decomp.wtf that made it easier to reverse engineer software and games has also shut down in recent days.
As we reported last month, Reverse Engineer-Anything has made it easy for people to use AI tools to hack electronics that they own and replace a manufacturer’s software or operating system with an open source or vibecoded one. People have installed new operating systems on their smart TVs, have turned baby monitors into AI assistants, have unbricked internet-of-things devices that were abandoned by their manufacturers, and have installed new software on very old hardware. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the trend, but as I’ve seen people take ownership and control back over the devices that manufacturers have purposefully bricked, turned into spyware, or have placed artificial limitations on, I have come to see AI-powered reverse engineering of electronic devices as one of the few LLM uses genuinely worth getting excited about. And so big companies have immediately taken steps to restrict this behavior.
The policy tweaks show that big AI corporations will protect other big corporations when their users find ways to use LLMs to circumvent the artificial constraints that hardware manufacturers put on their devices. AI-powered copyright circumvention is OK with big tech when it’s a massive company scraping the entire internet to build their LLMs, but is not OK when people then use those tools to liberate their internet-of-things devices. It’s not the end of AI-powered reverse engineering, but people suddenly getting locked out of their accounts for asking AI to reverse engineer their gadgets suggests that the future of this practice lies in open weight, local, and uncensored models, making it less accessible to the masses and the people who could probably benefit from it most.
Tarun Gogineni, an OpenAI engineer, tweeted that people are not supposed to have their OpenAI accounts restricted for reverse engineering: “these blocks are mostly accidental and a result of difficult decision boundaries; there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with codex. it’s getting fixed,” he tweeted.
But people who are doing AI-powered reverse-engineering suggest that they are moving away from big companies’ models to alternatives where they aren’t going to have their accounts disabled or have to figure out how to work around AI company guardrails.
“My general experience about reverse-engineering getting blocked has been more or less 100% correlated with the ‘cyber’ category blocks I have received. My take is that the lab[s] are probably under pressure to not have their models take part in some kind of criminal hacking activities and their cyber guardrails are erring on the side of being too strict,” Matt Brown, principal consultant at Brown Fine Security and someone who has been using AI to reverse-engineer devices, told 404 Media. “I am investing in hardware and trying to stay up to speed because the frontier labs guardrails will randomly change without warning on the same model. For my security research and pentesting work I really don’t want to invest tooling and energy into an ecosystem that will eventually lock me out. These guardrails on the frontier side have come at the same time as open weight models from (mostly) China are getting better and better.”
More from 404
“Do you have the gun”: According to a police incident report obtained by 404 Media, a father in South Carolina asked his six-year-old daughter if she “had the gun” before he left her alone at Target for more than an hour in the middle of the night so “he could maintain his place in line” to buy Pokémon cards.
Around the web
The biggest thing going on in tech right now is Jensen Huang’s apparent affair with an executive at the data center company Megaspeed who is an alleged Chinese spy. This isn’t the type of thing we cover very closely normally, and Sam mentioned it in the newsletter yesterday, but the latest is that the company is now getting sued over this. The AI slop You Can See Everything memes are out in full force. The incel looksmaxxers have weighed in (if you don’t understand this sentence, I won’t corrupt you). So on and so forth. If you’re curious why any of this might matter, The New York Times has a scoop that the U.S. Department of Commerce killed an investigation into a Megaspeed after Nvidia intervened. Cool government we have here. Anyways, moving on.
ICEd out: The Department of Justice said that it no longer has enough attorneys available to respond to every habeas corpus challenge, and will begin letting judges rule on cases with no government opposition. Basically this suggests that ICE has detained so many people illegally that it no longer has enough attorneys to argue in these cases. Alarming, but also means that enough people are challenging their detentions that ICE is beginning to cry uncle. Also, I would normally never suggest you go watch a Bari Weiss x Ross Douthat joint, but parts of the 60 Minutes interview with Trump were SO WILD. Perhaps this guy doesn’t really stand for anything? Hmm.
Help Court Watch: Our friends over at Court Watch are doing a subscriber drive. Court Watch grabs court records off the notoriously expensive PACER document system and makes them available for free and finds extremely interesting and important cases all the time. We partner with them on a bunch of stories so go check/help them out.
Enough: The best Raspberry Pi on the market now costs $385. I remember when the whole point of a Raspberry Pi was that it cost, like, $20. This is, of course, due to the RAM/memory/everything shortage caused by AI data center buildout. If you know what people are doing with these top-end Raspberry Pis, let me know?
SLOPPED: Actors alarmed to learn that they had been replaced by AI in the Return of the Living Dead sequel they were set to star in.
DOGE’d: The government’s IT systems are really fucked up, argues our friend Karl Bode in a piece aptly called “U.S. government IT systems are completely compromised and will require a total rebuild.”
The surveillance state, now for kids: The Atlantic has a deep dive on what constant surveillance is doing to children. I haven’t had time to read the full thing yet, but have been waiting for a piece like this for a long time.
They Rickrolled a printer: … They Rickrolled a printer.
