Since our first conversation with Morluto, some social media users have reported OpenAI and Anthropic banning or blocking their use of REA. In a reply on X, an OpenAI researcher called the block on reverse engineering “mostly accidental.”

Morluto isn’t worried. If anything, he says, the “fiasco” just brings more attention to the project and to the kind of discovery he was aiming for. “That’s the core of Reverse Engineer Anything,” he says. “It’s a road that leads you to question what it is that you want.”

Accidental or not, such obstacles are unlikely to stop people who really want to reverse engineer their devices. Castillo already has a fallback in GLM-5.3, an open-weight model from the Chinese company Z.ai. Once it’s downloaded, no one can take it away.

Source: An exclusive conversation with the developer of REA, the viral AI reverse engineering tool | Scientific American