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.

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.

Read the full article on vpnlab.io: https://vpnlab.io/en/codex-claude-reverse-engineering-blocks-bans-3318