AI Could Reverse Engineer Anything. Then It Started Refusing.

For six months, anyone could hand an AI a video game and ask how it works. A free tool called REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) put AI agents on the job, and fans used them to bring Bloodborne, inFAMOUS and Breath of the Wild to new machines. In October 2026 the answers started stopping halfway: Anthropic's newest models flag some of that work as a cyber risk and hand it to an older model, OpenAI banned a researcher who was taking apart their own TV, and a Chinese lab trained its next open model with the hacking data taken out. What happened that week, why a filter can't tell a mod from an attack, the labs' side, who gets the full-strength version, what gamers already won in court, and where modders go next. This is commentary and news analysis. Anthropic hadn't confirmed any change as of upload; the reports are users'. The code on screen is written for the film, and nothing here shows how to get around a filter. Chapters: 0:00 Reverse Engineer Anything* 0:44 Anything 2:05 Halfway 3:37 Same Words 5:28 The Blast Radius 6:43 Members Only 8:01 Already Legal 9:11 Own the Tool Have you hit the filter on a project of your own? Tell me what you were doing in the comments. SOURCES r/claude, "Anthropic secretly killed the REA train" (Oct 21 2026); r/ClaudeCode:   / the_dream_is_dead_reverse_engineer_anythin...   @AbhinavXJ: https://x.com/AbhinavXJ/status/211359... @0x0SojalSec: https://x.com/0x0SojalSec/status/2113... Kotaku (Oct 24): https://kotaku.com/claudes-reverse-en... r/ClaudeAI, the LG TV safeguard (Oct 25); r/LocalLLaMA, "OpenAI and Anthropic blocked the reverse engineering of smart TVs" (Oct 25) @log4j: https://x.com/log4j/status/2113647464... Kimi K3.1 Pro: https://www.kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3-1-pro Hugging Face removals: https://pasqualepillitteri.it/en/news... Claude Help Center: https://support.claude.com/en/article... · Cyber Verification Program: https://support.claude.com/en/article... madewithrea.com, "Is Claude blocking reverse engineering?" (Oct 24) Claude Code issues #64198 and #89396; ClAudit (sworrl) Ports' commit counts from their public GitHub histories (Oct 26): BOTWRecompAndroid, crashott-pc, MHGURecomp, BotW-Native, UltraTears PHP2Shell: https://ppc.land/openai-says-gpt-5-6-... Jason Clinton: https://x.com/JasonDClinton/status/21... Project Glasswing: https://techinformed.com/anthropic-la... OpenAI Daybreak: https://www.csoonline.com/article/417... Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... · https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... · https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... Anthropic, ECDSA curve origins (Oct 16): https://www.anthropic.com/research/ec... Galoob v. Nintendo (9th Cir. 1992) · Sega v. Accolade (9th Cir. 1992) · Sony v. Connectix (9th Cir. 2000) · 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) · EU Directive 2009/24/EC, Arts. 6 and 8 Nintendo's Rhythm Tengoku notice (Oct 23): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/m... FOOTAGE AND IMAGES Shown muted for commentary: Odespertado (Bloodborne PC, 4K), Deck Wizard, MKIceAndFire (inFAMOUS Second Son), HYDRA AJAY (God of War III PC), Jaimers (Touhou 4), Thrym865 (DX-Ball), MrBustedGamez (Minecraft Genetics mod), Techno Kish (BotW on Android), LONG GAMES (MHGU), Emulacion Retro (TotK native), Renaldo Lo Muto (Ishido), NeoGamer (Macworld 1999), YesterYear's MacGames (Virtual Game Station), Kirby Mastah (Rhythm Tengoku), Jake Stevens. Game Genie TV ad (1990, Galoob). Project media: BotW-Native, crashott-pc. Posts and screenshots from X, Reddit and GitHub as published. Xbox Series X photo: Der. Bellemer (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0). Thumbnail: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo), a frame from ZelMon's 4K scenepack. Chat sessions are labelled reconstructions using wording from user reports.