Reverse engineering your own gadgets with Codex or Claude now risks refusals and bans

People who used AI coding agents to take apart their own gadgets say the tools have started pushing back. 404 Media reported on 10 November that Claude Code users hit "safety checks" when they ask it to decompile programs, and that some Codex users received warnings or lost their OpenAI accounts for "cyber abuse". One of them had been reverse engineering Samsung smart TVs. An OpenAI engineer says the blocks are mostly a mistake and that reverse engineering with Codex is allowed. The 404 Media report contains no comment from Anthropic.

What users ran into

Over the past weeks a tool called Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) made it simple to point an AI agent at a device and have it pull out and read the firmware. People used it to install new operating systems on smart TVs, revive internet-connected gadgets their makers had abandoned and strip out tracking and ads. Then the refusals started. A popular post in the r/ClaudeCode subreddit is titled "The Dream is dead", and a thread in the REA Discord reads "Claude is refusing to decompile anything".

On the OpenAI side the consequences went further. The X user log4j, who used Codex on Samsung TVs, wrote on 23 October that the account had been banned, costing about $500, and that it had only ever been used for local reverse engineering, never to find or exploit vulnerabilities. A Chinese-speaking user said on 12 October that a four-year-old account was banned after trying REA with Codex. Another developer posted on 2 November that Codex sent a "Cyber Abuse" warning after a security review of the developer's own code. Separately, ChatGPT users have been reporting accounts deactivated without warning since early November.

What OpenAI says

OpenAI engineer Tarun Gogineni replied publicly to the complaints on 26 October. "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 wrote. OpenAI has not said how many accounts were affected or whether banned users will get them back.

Matt Brown, a security researcher and penetration tester at Brown Fine Security who uses AI to analyse devices, told 404 Media that every block he has seen on reverse engineering matched the "cyber" category. His reading is that AI labs are under pressure not to help criminal hackers and that their filters err on the strict side.

Where the work is moving

Brown says he is buying hardware to run models himself because the big labs' rules "will randomly change without warning on the same model". He recently used the open-weight model GLM 5.3 to find hidden Bluetooth commands in a gas monitor attached to his propane tank. Running a model locally takes a powerful computer and some skill, so this kind of research gets harder for ordinary owners who want to see what their TV or camera reports back to the manufacturer.

One related closure has a different cause. 404 Media also noted that Decomp.wtf, a tool for AI-assisted decompilation of games, shut down. Its author explains that the decision followed objections from the decompilation community, not pressure from an AI company. The code stays on GitHub under the MIT license.