Post by @karen@floss.social

This piece from @ossguy, following up on his SeaGL keynote, talks about how use of #LLMs is already helping some people control their own technology and use #FOSS on devices previously locked out by proprietary software.

As he says, "it is hard to ignore the benefits to people's digital autonomy that reverse engineering like this brings."

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/nov/05/foss-in-the-age-of-llm-gen-ai-assisted-reverse-eng/

#LLMGenAI #LLM #AI

Software Freedom Conservancy

My Keynote at SeaGL and LLM-gen-AI-assisted Reverse Engineering

Over the past few months, there have been an increasing number of reports of people successfully gaining access to their own devices that were designed to prevent them from installing their own updates and modifications. Nearly every one of these reports notes that an LLM-gen-AI was used. While there are obviously a huge number of issues with LLM-gen-AIs (as we note in our LLM-gen-AI recommendations), it is hard to ignore the benefits to people's digital autonomy that reverse engineering like this brings.

#llmgenai #llms #llm #foss #ai

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David Reed

@aoristdual@floss.social 18 min. ago

@karen @ossguy But this is a technical solution to a legal problem. Users shouldn't have to hack devices they own. Users shouldn't be criminalized under the DMCA for doing so, or for distributing hacks.

Since LLMs centralize power (Anthropic has already begun blocking decompilation), their use here is anti-liberatory.

We don't need more reverse engineering; we need less need for reverse engineering.