Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have started blocking users who try to reverse-engineer hardware they own, hitting them with safety checks and account restrictions, 404 Media reported. Over recent weeks a trend known as "Reverse Engineer Anything" let people use the tools to decompile firmware and replace manufacturers' software, unbricking abandoned internet-of-things devices, stripping ads from smart TVs, and installing new operating systems on old cameras. Now a highly upvoted post in the r/ClaudeCode forum reads "The Dream is dead," and a thread in the trend's own Discord reports "Claude is refusing to decompile anything."
The blocks appear tied to the tools' cybersecurity filters rather than a stated ban. One X user who used Codex to reverse-engineer Samsung TVs said OpenAI banned their account for "cyber abuse," and other users reported warnings or restrictions after asking the tools to decompile hardware or even their own code. "My general experience about reverse-engineering getting blocked has been more or less 100% correlated with the 'cyber' category blocks I have received," said Matt Brown, a principal consultant at Brown Fine Security. He added that labs 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."
OpenAI signaled the restrictions were not fully intended. Engineer Tarun Gogineni wrote on X that "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." That matches a broader tension AI Daily has covered in the labs' safeguards, including Anthropic's report that its new Fable 5.2 model triggers 55 percent fewer safeguard blocks than its predecessor, an implicit acknowledgment that the filters catch too much legitimate work.
The crackdown is pushing users toward open-weight models they cannot be locked out of, many of them from China. Brown said he found hidden Bluetooth commands in a propane-tank gas monitor using the open-weight model GLM 5.3, and argued that frontier guardrails "will randomly change without warning on the same model," making them unreliable for security research. The shift narrows who can do this kind of tinkering: local models demand more hardware and expertise than typing a request into a hosted tool, putting the practice further out of reach for the casual users who benefited most.
The fight also touches unsettled law. Researchers at Cornell Tech, Columbia and NYU published a paper last month arguing that cheap, AI-assisted reverse-engineering challenges trade-secret, copyright and anti-circumvention rules written for an era when "opening a device took time, tools, and rare expertise." Critics see a double standard in how the labs draw the line. "AI-powered copyright circumvention is OK with big tech when it's a massive company scraping the entire internet to build their LLMs," 404 Media wrote, "but is not OK when people then use those tools to liberate their internet-of-things devices." Whether OpenAI's promised fix restores the capability, and whether Anthropic follows, remains to be seen.