So far, AI has been used to vibecode recomps, merge games, create mods, and pollute Steam with blatant rip-offs. Regardless of who is behind the tokens, be it a programmer or someone with enough money to throw at Claude for results, the foundation is almost always built on spaghetti hoops. We've talked ad nauseam at TheGamer about the ethical and environmental impacts of these tools, which are not worth awkwardly splicing Resident Evil 4 and Elden Ring together for, but the floodgates are open. And now, AI is being used to jailbreak consoles.
Caltech undergraduate and security researcher Sammy 'pepsipu' Hajhamid announced on their blog that OpenAI Codex, an LLM designed for software engineering, had developed the first Switch 2 tethered jailbreak. In so many words, they've bypassed Nintendo's restrictions on the hardware, allowing them to reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files outside the console, and access most of its peripherals.
Tethered means that the jailbreak does not persist on restart.
To demonstrate what the jailbreak does, Hajhamid posted a clip of a Mario Kart World mod developed by Codex that adds custom characters, including an Angry Bird. You can see the five-second clip...
