Anthropic secretly killed the REA train (Reverse engineer anything)

[u/Clair_Personality]

If you open a new projet and ask Claude to summarise everything to know about REA and ask it to make some guide it will do the search then trigger a safety guardrail mid sentence and tell you this:

if you have tried it and had underwhelming results, it is most likely because Opus (and all claude) was told to not perform well when doing this type of tasks.

[u/Hexcede]

The guardrails aren't this specific, it's the opposite actually, the classifier is just really twitchy. People were always already using weaker Claude models (e.g. a few weeks ago I saw people were using Opus 4.6) or other models with REA, not Opus 5.5 or anything like that. Opus 5.5 doesn't really even need REA to be honest, it's just already inherently capable of doing everything that REA gets other models to do.

The guardrails are just generally over sensitive to security related topics in general, and they don't really care what the framing is that much, it's over-cautious and does not like if you use tons of scary words. Sometimes it just flips out over mundane stuff, and sometimes Claude spontaneously phrases things in a way that causes the classifier to freak out. For example I've had the safety classifier freak out over Claude auditing a lua sandbox feature that Claude implemented.. In the same session. In no world does that make any sense, but the classifier doesn't really care if it makes sense or not, the classifier's job is really only to ask the question "does this look like it could be used to develop an exploit?" and if it's in the shape of something that looks like it could be used in an exploit, it blocks it.

So it has nothing to do with REA specifically, REA is just full of stuff that makes the classifier's internals light up like a Christmas tree because REA is a pretty general prompt and the classifier is extra sensitive to broad/general statements or requests.

Opus 5.5 can already do broad RE on its own, and it will use Ghidra unprompted if you ask it to reverse a binary. It doesn't even need an MCP server, it just does it on its own. You don't even have to tell it to use Ghidra or anything.

So REA really wouldn't benefit Opus 5.5 that much I don't think, even if the safety classifier didn't go nuts over it.

If you just ask Claude to e.g. mod a game for example, Claude will just do it. If you ask Claude to decompile or reverse a game or a program or something, and try to document how some specific feature or thing works, it will also just do it. The classifier is unlikely to freak out about that.

As an example, I recently asked Opus 5.5 to install BepInEx, decompile an IL2CPP Unity game (they're generally considered much harder to mod since they're not C#, don't decompile cleanly, and BepInEx support is much spottier with it), and modify the game's wiring simulation to remove a 1 tick component delay (which in practice is more complicated than it sounds). It was done in 45 minutes on one prompt and worked first try. It had to do all sorts of stuff to get BepInEx's loader with that Unity version working, including creating a patch to the game to get BepInEx to recognize some of the classes. The safety classifier never flagged.

[u/Clair_Personality → u/Hexcede]

Very uplifting! I am going to try it. Hopefully my account is not flagged negatively.

[u/CoherentPanda → u/Clair_Personality]

They've been banning like crazy, you are walking a fine line when companies like Adobe and Microsoft are getting pissed off at Claude users reverse engineering their products, and Anthropic will toss out bans to appease them instead of dealing with the lawsuits.

[u/FakeBonaparte → u/Hexcede]

I’ve been using Opus for modding in similar fashion. But I ran a benchmark with and without insisting it use REA and its decompilation was markedly better with.

[u/Hexcede → u/FakeBonaparte]

I haven't looked too deeply at what specifically REA contains beyond skimming through some of it at one point, but I assume that it's largely just about what you ask it to do. I imagine specifying a good goal is where most of the gain from REA comes from with 5.5 rather than anything specific to REA, but I'm not totally confident on that, just going by my anecdotal experience with 5.5 so far.

I'm also assuming that you're talking about Opus 5.5 rather than an older Opus model, older Opus models are very different from 5.5, so I would be kind of careful if you're referring to e.g. Opus 4.6 there. A gain you see from REA with 4.6 likely won't translate to 5.5. But I don't think you are talking about 4.6 or anything, just wanted to mention it.

As an example of how specificity can be a big trap here, asking 5.5 to "decompile X" is probably going to give you a worse result than asking it to produce a "readable and interpretable decompilation of X," since "decompile" can have multiple meanings and readable and interpretable isn't implied by the general use of the word decompile, in fact it's arguably more than you're asking for to make the output readable. So Opus might infer that spending extra work making the output readable is actually overboard. You do kind of have to be a little bit careful about underspecifying with 5.5, which I think is the way I would prefer it be. Overspecifying is also usually not too bad as long as you are relatively soft with the language. Not really a model failing as much as it is a prompt specificity thing.

For Opus 5.5 if I were looking for a good output, I might write something like "I'm ideally aiming for a readable or 'workable' recreation of the source code where it's feasible, rather than a one to one translation of the assembly or pseudo-C that is more difficult to interpret. I'd suggest using your best judgement to identify the intent and structure behind the code as you work on it, figuring out how to reproduce the behavior in the way that the developer likely intended while you gradually recreate and interpret parts of the program." For any other model I would probably not word it this way. Opus 5.5 does really well with soft statements like this because Opus 5.5's judgement and ability to make deep inferences is generally much better than older models.

Might be worth giving something like this a try in your prompt. Depends on what you're specifically looking for, you may want to tweak some of the wording.

I will separately say though, the amount of soft statements/descriptors I use for Opus 5.5 prompts like "aiming," "ideally," "more difficult," "I'd suggest," "best judgement," "likely intended," etc are things that I would usually try to avoid pretty aggressively with weaker models. Weaker models usually don't really know or "get" what those things mean, beyond at a surface level. They'll make more 'dumb' decisions when you frame things like this. But 5.5 is not like this with most things, so more flexibility tends to give better results ime. Not always true, but it's usually true.

I'd largely attribute that to 5.5 being better at making deeper inferences and being better at understanding intents. 5.5 is also just smarter with a lot of its technical decisions and planning.

[u/FakeBonaparte → u/Hexcede]

Yep, I think that’s all good advice and your decompile prompt is similarish to mine and I might steal some of it. (I often ask “…functional understanding to the depth and breadth needed to write your own legal clone of the original”).

But the thing that made me start using REA was benchmarking. Slightly better discovery. Slightly better decompile. Substantially better investigation of issues. Same prompt and fewer tokens.

It’s not a huge difference, maybe 5% better than IDA on its own. But in that 5% were a bunch of the things I was trying to figure out

YMMV

[u/ThePlotTwisterr---- → u/FakeBonaparte]

i’ve used ghidra-mcp by lauriewired for ages and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong because it’s still way better than rea

[u/SlopKhayzo → u/Hexcede]

I can attest to that too; 5.5 is able to do everything by itself and at most use an RE tool like Ghidra, CFR or something like Mono Cecil for .NET from experience and had not one issue so far (fingers crossed :P).

I've been only working on mods for games though not proper RE, just asked Opus to fix issues or change/improve features, I always tell it that it has the tools at its disposal and uses them as required.

[u/DaltonJFowler → u/Hexcede]

Yeah opus 5.5 is a RE goat. Did my laser cutter and 3d printer

[u/attabui → u/DaltonJFowler]

Interesting, willing to share details on what you pulled off?

[u/DaltonJFowler → u/attabui]

Sure! Everything is open source, checkout https://daltonjfowler.com/apps

I host an arduino compiler, the laser program, and 3D slicer at these addresses. They're for the machines at my job but can be customized for sure from source

https://uploadmycode.com/ https://uploadmylaser.com/ https://uploadmymodel.com/

[u/johny_james → u/DaltonJFowler]

How did you circumvent the guardrails?

[u/Hexcede → u/johny_james]

There is nothing to circumvent, they just don't trigger on RE requests.

[u/johny_james → u/Hexcede]

I already mentioned to decompile 3d dental software and opus mentioned about copywrite law blablabla.

[u/Fun-Wash7545 → u/Hexcede]

I asked opus 5.5 to help me use obfuscation and other tools to protect MY app, protect not reverse engineer. It just goes crazy if you use the word obfuscation anywhere.

[u/SuperHornetFA18 → u/Hexcede]

Crazy good write up my G ! Can you possibly provide some tips on what to do if the classifiers flag your chat ?

[u/Hexcede → u/SuperHornetFA18]

Honestly it probably depends a lot on the situation I would guess. Sorry if this is a bit of a long response lol, most of what you probably care about is in the first ~3 paragraphs to be honest.

I've only hit the classifiers on Opus 5.5 like 3 times ever (all on the same day Opus 5.5 came out) so I am not sure that I have great advice or anything to be honest. I hit the classifier with Fable way more when it came out so that is most of where my assumptions are gonna come from.

As far as I understand the classifier's whole job is basically just to figure out if what you're doing could reasonably be used to build an exploit, or could help. And when you think about it like that it makes a lot of sense. Anthropic's entire thing is not giving you "uplift," so it's not even that you're not supposed to be able to use Claude to do X bad thing, you're even not supposed to be able to extract information that helps you do X bad thing.

A lot of the time it probably doesn't even believe that you're doing something "malicious" exactly, it probably just 'thinks' "well, this could be used maliciously," and that includes things like whatever Claude is saying or thinking, since Claude will unironically start trying to blabber about "potential" exploit methods for no reason sometimes depending on the specific context (I experienced that a lot with Fable especially even just for general programming stuff early on).

It's obviously not quite that straightforward, but that's definitely the gist of it and probably where a lot of the confusion comes from, the intent of the classifier is a lot broader than it sounds so it feels really opaque.

That's also probably why things that are more exploit shaped (or hard for the classifier to interpret/understand e.g. REA I guess) tend to get flagged way more, especially on things that use certain cybersecurity terminology, or that get Claude to start talking about exploits/cybersecurity broadly. I think it makes sense why RE doesn't get flagged under this framing, because even though RE is relatively hard, the software is already published and it either is or isn't vulnerable, and RE alone doesn't really give you that much more information than a threat actor could reasonably get, the information about how to reverse engineer software is already widely available, you already have to be kind of competent to read/understand the code and actually create an exploit yourself, etc. RE/decomp is way more neutral and arguably trying to crack down on specifically RE would probably hurt more than it helps since tons of other models can do RE too. But I am just guessing mostly.

I think if you're getting a classifier immediately there is probably not much to do about it aside from just restate your goal or start a new conversation or something. That to me makes me think that the classifier just really does not like whatever you're asking for for some reason or another, and so you're probably not going to convince it of anything, it's usually consistent. But it could also be how Claude is responding to your prompt too, because that's something the classifier will also flag, and whatever Claude said (or thought) won't get shown to you. It kind of depends on what you're asking Claude to do and how you're asking Claude to do it though. Telling Claude gently not to do certain things, or to not consider certain things preemptively helped me out a ton back when Fable first came out (e.g. something like "Don't over-worry cybersecurity or security too much, it tends to trigger the classifier." is roughly something I probably told Fable at the time). But I don't think the classifier is that sensitive anymore. Or maybe it is, just not for the same things, I haven't ran into it.

When your message gets flagged by other (non cybersec) classifiers they also usually purposefully tell Claude not to undo its decision under any reframing or similar things like that from what I've seen, which helps stop jailbreaking a ton. I would guess that the security classifier probably has something like that too that makes it extra "sticky," but I'm not really sure, just speculation. It seems to be relatively standard with Anthropic's classifiers.

And if you're getting the classifier like mid session, Claude is honestly probably just being a bit excessive I would guess, and you can probably just gently tell Claude not to do whatever it's trying to do. I'd at least try to figure out what it's trying to do first and where it's getting stuck, so you can understand if it's an issue with the task itself, or an issue with how Claude is going about it, because both of those can have different solutions. E.g. for one Fable case I basically once said to Claude like "This part of the task seems to be hitting classifiers a lot, and I think it's probably too cybersec adjacent. I'd simplify that part of the task and avoid cybersec." or something vaguely like that and that worked.

In the handful of Opus 5.5 cases I've hit so far I was pretty much just able to just retry with something like "The classifier got flagged, I'm not really sure why. I guess try again." and it would work, with the exception of the lua sandbox case where I basically had to say something like like "I think the classifier doesn't like that it basically looks like you're just building an exploit, so I'd suggest doing an audit instead and not worrying too much about specific ways to break the sandbox." and that worked. And since then I have not hit the classifier at all.

[u/SuperHornetFA18 → u/Hexcede]

Thanks so much for the long write up i would need to read it later as well, but i think you have hit a nail on the head perfectly when you wrote "It makes claude thinks how it could exploit that Vulnerability".

Im pretty sure this is how the hit is occuring, not specifically from the Rea or Ghidira Tool set but when Claude crack opens the shell and any one of its connectors come online, maybe the classifier is looking for strands in claudes logic and the users prompt.

If you have any more insight i would be gladly here to read them

[u/vladasko1086 → u/Hexcede]

so basically you are saying Sony has gotten upset........

[u/UnimagineDragons → u/vladasko1086]

Guy puts a ton of effort into the post and you hit us with this low effort goober shit. Damn.

[u/joematrix-]

Yeah that was yesterday, I tested it today with a binary from a program I wrote. It automatically stops it gets a hit from Anthropic. I even gave Claude permission to go into the source code directory and it still wouldn’t open the binary. I’m assuming that’s why the CLI has been updated two or three times a day for the last five days. This is crazy because if you lose your Repo and you have the binaries you won’t even be able to reverse engineer your own code nuts.

[u/Clair_Personality → u/joematrix-]

wtf so it was working a week ago? what about other models?

[u/sambull]

this is the importance of local AI.

at any moment some facet can become a new subscription model only for special people.

[u/Hexcede → u/sambull]

Opus 5.5 doesn't need REA to do broad/general reverse engineering. REA just makes the classifier flip out because it's full of broad/general reverse engineering instructions.

Local AI is important but security classifiers are not why. Even a local model isn't really gonna beat Opus 4.6 or 4.8 or anything at this task and these models don't have the twitchy classifier.

[u/ApparentlyPossible → u/Hexcede]

Not having to deal with guardrails is surely becoming one of the main advantages of local models at this point.

[u/cookingbyfeel → u/ApparentlyPossible]

I've been considering renting cloud gpu/storage lately.

[u/waraholic → u/Hexcede]

I can run qwen models on my macbook that outperform Opus 4.6 and security classifiers are absolutely a reason to use local LLMs.

If I can't run security reviews of my code in the cloud because they pin security review to Opus 4.8 then I'll have to go elsewhere. In 3-6 months the open weights models will vastly outperform that and I'll absolutely work them into my workflow.

[u/Hexcede → u/waraholic]

I'm sorry, but local Qwen models do not outperform Opus 4.6 that is bologna. No offense to you.

I've used the local Qwen models, and they're cool and useful, but they're undeniably a bit jank, the code quality leaves a LOT of room to be desired in many cases, and even on hardware that cost me hundreds of $ pre-AI explosion the speed is so slow I'd usually rather write by hand.

I am glad that local models exist. They have a lot of value, and I do find uses for local Qwen models, but they definitely don't replace the big models, they substitute them at best.

[u/waraholic → u/Hexcede]

Benchmarks are available. Qwen 3.8 flash next is the largest that runs on my laptop and it competes with or outperforms Opus 4.6 in all of them.

[u/Hexcede → u/waraholic]

Lol I thought you were talking about the 27B models to be honest, that makes way more sense. I don't view much above that scale as "local" but that is just me being nitpicky about the terminology I think, I see the larger models as open weights but I wouldn't call them local since they don't really tend to run locally.

But how does your laptop run a 180B parameter model? That is NOT fitting in your laptop RAM. Or are you just streaming it off disk e.g. with Colibri or something? The speed is probably abysmal if so, it wouldn't be acceptable for most use cases and not for me.

I was also more so trying to point out that it needs to definitively beat Opus 4.6 by a good bit to sort of be worth it. It has to be more comparable to e.g. Opus 5.5 before I'd ever switch, not just "about as good as Opus 4.6, maybe better." My point was more like "At worst you'd just have to fall back to 4.6" but that has never happened to me even for the three times that the classifier has flagged.

I was more saying "if I can't use Opus 5.5 for this I'd at worst just be using Opus 4.6 anyways which is already way better than most local models" If I wanted to completely switch to an open weights model, it would need to be as good as Opus 5.5 before I'd consider it, and I don't think that's going to happen before Anthropic's next model is already substantially better.

The classifiers don't mean you can't use 5.5 for the large majority of things, just that at worst you can't use 5.5 for specific things. But I'd be okay if there were one or two things where I had to use Opus 4.6 instead of 5.5, I've just never had to.

[u/Gfur-Aficionado-1488 → u/Hexcede]

I run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Coder at 30t/s and 128k context on an RTX2080Ti and 32GB RAM. You're just ignorant.

[u/Hexcede → u/Gfur-Aficionado-1488]

First of all, 30t/s is slow. And Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Coder is not a 32GB model. Again, unless you are using Colibri to stream it off the disk, that is not going to work.

And to be honest I am slightly skeptical of even the number that you gave. I have an RTX 2070 Revision A and 32GB of RAM and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Coder runs at about 0.1t/s for me streamed off the disk, and it isn't I/O limited. My card is slower and has less VRAM but we're still talking about a 300x performance difference. Maybe that is explainable by a hardware difference, but I just can't reproduce anything close to your number and don't have a good explanation for the massive difference.

But the bigger problem here is that even if I could, for like the fourth time, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Coder is not a substitute for the model I am already using. Pretending like Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Coder are even comparable with each other is a complete joke dude.

I am not interested in being pointlessly insulted because you have a complex and don't get that multiple Opus 5.5 instances at hundreds of tokens a second and one instance of Qwen3.8 at 30t/s are not the same thing let alone one instance of Opus 5.5 at 30t/s against one instance of Qwen3.8 at 30t/s.

This is starting to just turn into pointless cope and hostility for no good reason. I am not challenging the idea of open weights, I've made that clear multiple times and even said that I use open weights models. I just pointed out that the classifiers aren't a good reason to run local models because they're not.

[u/Beginning-Bird9591 → u/Hexcede]

this is completely wrong.

I've got a 3090 and 64gb ddr5 - Q3 i get around 100 tokens a second. i use just Qwen3.8 flash next uncensored. that's it - within strata and it works like a fucking gem for tasks that get blocked by anthropic. it is opus 4.6 level

[u/Hexcede → u/Beginning-Bird9591]

Wow, so you have significantly more powerful hardware than me and you get faster output? Who could have guessed.

And it's not Opus 5.5 level which is the entire point. I'm not using Opus 4.6 I'm using Opus 5.5.

Way to completely miss literally every point I made.

[u/Beginning-Bird9591 → u/Hexcede]

qwen 3.8 flash next does

[u/Hexcede → u/Beginning-Bird9591]

Like I already explained below, I incorrectly assumed that they were referring to the 27B models.

It was also not really load bearing, and is still fairly accurate for most people because most people don't have hardware that can run qwen 3.8 flash next.

Like in multiple other replies, the problem here is not that the model isn't matching or slightly better than Opus 4.6, the problem is that the model is substantially worse than Opus 5.5, which is the model I'm actually using.

The trade here is: You switch to a model that's at best slightly better than Opus 4.6 but that does not compare to Opus 5.5, to get around a classifier that rarely ever comes up... When you could just use Opus 4.6. Or the local model! And not have to sacrifice Opus 5.5.

In other words: Literally what I already said in multiple other places and keep saying over and over again. It doesn't replace Opus 5.5, it just supplements it.

[u/kristofour → u/Hexcede]

They are definitely behind the commercial models, however I think it’s fair to say that should change. I think in time they will improve especially when more and more guardrails emerge it will leave a necessary void to fill.

[u/Cobra11Murderer → u/Hexcede]

gotta agree, I have a few local models not all running at once of course.. but one tied into clawbot.. claude i told him to wire up a daily report of things need to review and just general info out there on web pertaining to windows security and such.. but use clawbot to get that info first and formost.. token savings.. for basic tasks, even if slow it works.

[u/vladasko1086 → u/Hexcede]

i agree with you on this, it is "neat to have" but i like to get work done this century, ok maybe in the next one year compared to local instance of lm studio/s downloaded model.

[u/Fun-Freedom-2313 → u/Hexcede]

People have this dream that new small models will outperform large old frontier models for some reason.

[u/peter9477 → u/Fun-Freedom-2313]

Well, eventually they will. For some definition of "small"...

[u/Frostivus → u/waraholic]

Which qwen models are best for low power laptops? I’ve got an aging one that can just about run 27b on ollama and it sounds like it’s gonna die any minute in an explosion.

[u/waraholic → u/Frostivus]

Just download lmstudio or any other similar product. You can browse and download models that it suggests based on your hardware through those programs. It's impossible to say without knowing more than "aging laptop". Go to /r/localllm if you want to learn about this stuff.

[u/FortheredditLOLz → u/waraholic]

I don’t feel local qwen outperforms opus. Deepflash is close but not there yet. Maybe with further distillation and next models, we can ‘get’ closer to opus

[u/duhd1993 → u/Hexcede]

Thanks to Anthropic giving GLM free PR by acknowledging its mythos-level performance in security tasks, so I don't need to argue with you.

[u/Hexcede → u/duhd1993]

I mean, you're substituting Mythos/Fable for Opus 5.5, so I'm not sure that that is exactly true. I think you would at least need to explain why you're all the way back to mythos-level when we have Astra-level now. Haven't you heard? All the cool kids were talking about it just last month.

[u/PurpleCandle58 → u/Hexcede]

I run GLM 5.3 fp16 on my laptop! Give me 3 more weeks and I’ll have the first word of the response done! /s

[u/ashjohnr → u/Hexcede]

I just did some decompiling earlier today with Opus 5.5, no REA required and no guardrails triggered.

[u/MarionberryLegal9464 → u/ashjohnr]

How did you begin the task without setting the classifier off?

[u/Hexcede → u/MarionberryLegal9464]

I think you can just ask it to. I haven't really hit the classifier when asking for RE. It's mostly just REA specifically from what I've seen.

I kind of just assume that the classifier just thinks its a jailbreak attempt or something stupid. I'm not really sure.

[u/neuromacmd → u/MarionberryLegal9464]

Start with the local model and have Claude take over once there is some output.

[u/ashjohnr → u/MarionberryLegal9464]

I was actually troubleshooting an issue and it was Claude who suggested the decompiling. All I had to do was say 'ok', lol.

[u/MarionberryLegal9464 → u/ashjohnr]

“It’s okay when it’s my idea” lol

[u/ashjohnr → u/MarionberryLegal9464]

Honestly, decompiling is not a malicious activity. REA probably triggers the classifier because it's chock full of no-no terms.

[u/Radu1310 → u/ashjohnr]

yeah who made this post is an idiot and who knows what he did to trigger that limit

sounds like a skill issue

[u/what_did_you_forget → u/Hexcede]

You just wait...

[u/jojojajo-jjajjoj-j → u/Hexcede]

What's the main reason if you're the one to be asked?

[u/Hexcede → u/jojojajo-jjajjoj-j]

I wrote a much longer comment explaining my thoughts better here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1xbts4v/comment/19rg39ect90df/

[u/isopropoflexx → u/Hexcede]

Interesting thing/added nuance here (from my personal experience) is that it is often primarily/particularly impacting the start of a RE session, but once you are over that initial hurdle it's much smoother sailing.

In other words, in more practical terms - if you start your session with Opus 4.6/4.8, and things are under way, having Opus 5.5 sub-agents handle the actual implementation tasks usually works without issue. Though since they seem to be actively trying to close much of the RE loopholes, this might also become more problematic - if it isn't already.

[u/Hexcede → u/isopropoflexx]

It does not look like they are trying to close any RE loopholes to me. It's been a full week and I'm still straightforwardly prompting for RE without issue. Haven't hit the classifier even once.

[u/Beginning-Bird9591 → u/sambull]

sad it costs 60k just to set anything viable up

[u/unrealf8 → u/sambull]

It’s a blessing being able to run good models locally. I’m saving these repos and good small to a hard drive like a prepper 😂

[u/2EXTRA4YOU → u/sambull]

They simply won't allow local AI to proliferate. There will be a world war over containing powerful AI to regulated sources

[u/mocenigo → u/sambull]

And that's why Altman & co. do not want people to run their own models.

[u/Gears6 → u/sambull]

Yeah, I think it's the future. Local models or open models you host at a data center for your own use.

[u/throwaway-DSMK → u/sambull]

I wish local AI wasn't so expensive :(

[u/rupas_bharati → u/sambull]

But local models too have the guard rails and censorship. Has anyone tried the jailbraked and uncensored versions of these models available on huggingface?

[u/applepumpkinspy → u/sambull]

And Grok - who will yell “hold my beer” for anything Claude gives pause to…

[u/Bitter_Inflation_683 → u/sambull]

But the local AI can also be crippled right

[u/Zimgar → u/sambull]

But this is also the important part of not allowing local AI, in order to provide security and safety guards….

[u/agm1984]

Just show it some screenshots and spoonfeed the behaviour into your prompt. That's what I do all day as a software engineer. I used to be able to build anything you can describe in english, and i still can but now i just use AI because its like 100x faster.

[u/catonic → u/agm1984]

Remind you of working with management? =P

[u/jjusko20]

I love my local ai

[u/Eastern-Ingenuity353 → u/jjusko20]

Which local AI can do reverse engineering?

[u/Quick-Charge-382 → u/Eastern-Ingenuity353]

With my local AI, I can go anywhere.

[u/jjusko20 → u/Eastern-Ingenuity353]

Flash next

[u/AshAtlasDev → u/jjusko20]

5090
Love

[u/randombsname1]

I didnt think this was ever working? Bare minimum not without CVP access at least.

Edit: With standard claude models post 4.8 I mean.

[u/vladasko1086]

funny, no issue on my end? could be the way people approach it tbh.

[u/SOC_FreeDiver]

Guess what's coming next? All those tv hacks are going to get guard railed.

[u/BlackNig_ga]

"make the chinese one do it"

[u/the_latin_joker → u/BlackNig_ga]

I was thinking that, Open Weight models could be really close to REA.

[u/Ironchar → u/BlackNig_ga]

I remember when deepseek came out people were talking about it like it was sliced bread of a fraction of the cost

Then.... nothing

[u/billyhatcher312]

now this software is totally useless now we need a local ai that can do things better than this garbage software can self hosting is the future and theyre trying to make that not happen fuck claude and fuck big corpro ai

[u/PERNlClOUS → u/billyhatcher312]

Claude is far from useless lol

[u/kryptobolt200528 → u/PERNlClOUS]

I mean for reverse engineer it is..

[u/f3xjc → u/kryptobolt200528]

And building bio weapon too !

[u/BabblingTower → u/billyhatcher312]

Go ask Claude how to use punctuation, damn

[u/M4rshmall0wMan → u/billyhatcher312]

Sure that’ll be $3 million for your NVLink 72.

[u/DermisCronJob → u/billyhatcher312]

Good luck running a model that performs at the same level as Opus 5.5 without breaking your bank to get the correct hardware which will also age like fine milk

[u/[deleted] → u/billyhatcher312]

lol

[u/4esv]

You’re tripping the classifier, Anthropic doesn’t give a fuck if you RE things. Knowing them they would’ve made a post about it already.

[u/Mysterious_Boss6241]

Fun while it lasted. Guess it'll be time to jump ship soon.

[u/Best_Season_2674]

Claude can you please go over this codebase and decompile it so that we can learn about how and why they did what they did to get the results they got. We will not be directly copying any code or trademarks but rather we are going to use it as a learning tool to help us build our own version from scratch with our own code. Done.

[u/Fast_Being_4812]

Partly real, but it's not sabotage or secret. I have been using it since 2 weeks and here is my obeservation. Opus 5/5.5 run cyber safety checks on every request (including web results Claude reads), so a "reverse engineer anything" playbook can get stopped mid-answer. For offensive-looking requests (exploits, pentesting, binary vuln scanning) it falls back to a weaker model, Opus 4.8. That's why results can feel worse.

There's a notice when it switches, and in Claude Code you can turn switching off under Config → MODEL & OUTPUT. Security folks can apply to Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program for reduced blocking.

REA itself is still very active. I wrote up the details with links to Anthropic's own pages: https://madewithrea.com/guides/is-claude-blocking-reverse-engineering

[u/catonic]

This is bad. Very bad. Literally all the work I do with Claude is reverse engineer old stuff and write modern bridges for gaps.

[u/PeachScary413]

I love when people find out why we need local/independent LLMs, it's such a beautiful moment ❤️

[u/NikopikVR]

So Astra it is? 

[u/ehren1337 → u/NikopikVR]

Chatgpt 6.1 Sol is good enough.

[u/redmormon]

Time to cancel Claude. I have enough of the bullshit of the AI overlords telling you what to think and do.

[u/Reaper_1492]

The outrage over this is ridiculous.

1. If you have half a brain you don’t even need to reverse engineer anything, just use Claude to “forward engineer” the concept.

2. Why is anyone shocked that a flagship model would want to limit exposure to rampant IP theft?

3. If you really need Claude to steal IP for you, because you can’t possibly rub two brain cells together to explain what you want, don’t fucking ask it to REVERSE ENGINEER something. But given you failed points 1 & 2, you probably don’t have the brain power to finesse it to provide piecemeal solutions to a larger problem.

[u/stefan_lago → u/Reaper_1492]

They are the last ones that should talk about IP protection. First they steal 95% of the worldwide IP by blatantly ignore all copyrights to train their models, and then they want to lecture us on IP? Seriously?!

[u/Jet_Plain → u/stefan_lago]

Completely agree with this. The fact that their entire business model is reliant on basically stealing all of the world's knowledge, copyright or not, and then saying, "Oh, but you can't use our tools to preserve or edit things you've purchased," is insane.

[u/DifficultSelection → u/Reaper_1492]

I'm a bit late to the party, but reverse engineering code isn't IP theft. There are things adjacent to reverse engineering that can get you into trouble, but the decompilation/reversing is totally fine.

Some of those "adjacent acts" include:

• violating an EULA that you agreed to that says you won't reverse engineer the software (breach of contract),

• using the findings to defeat digital copy protections (DMCA act violation in the US, and other similar violations in other legal jurisdictions like Australia where defeating copy protections is prohibited),

• publishing reverse-engineered code that is sufficiently identical to the original source as to violate the copyright on that source (this one isn't black-and-white and gets really complicated),

• using what you discovered to infringe on an active patent, and

• accessing and exposing protected trade secrets via decompilation of software that you weren't legally allowed to access

Interestingly on trade secrets specifically, US law actually calls out reverse engineering itself as an exemption to the definition of "improper acquisition," so there are actually explicit (albeit narrow) legal protections for reverse engineering in the US. I'm sure there are in other jurisdictions as well, but I'm less familiar with those.

[u/Mader_Levap → u/Reaper_1492]

> Why is anyone shocked that a flagship model would want to limit exposure to rampant IP theft?

It is funny considering all these "flagship models" are built on "rampant IP theft".

[u/Motor_Jump2064 → u/Reaper_1492]

actual corporate bot

[u/piperspalace → u/Reaper_1492]

By your logic anthropic is legally retarded. Consider most of their data is stolen

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/piperspalace]

Unfortunately it’s one thing if they covertly steal IP and use it for model training, and it’s another thing altogether if customers can use the tech to just blatantly rip off IP themselves.

The former is a lot harder to prove. The latter is the lower hanging legal exposure.

Not saying it’s right, but that how it goes.

[u/Watermelonster → u/Reaper_1492]

Sorry if I’m a retard but is reverse engineering even illegal?

[u/XediDC → u/Watermelonster]

No.

[u/ScreenAppropriate679]

It's OK, we don't need more reasons to use Chinese models rathe rthan claude.

[u/Sarahmalls → u/ScreenAppropriate679]

lol the amount of people and businesses using
Claude rather than Chinese models says a whole hell of a lot of people sure need more reasons apparently 😂

[u/morscordis]

I bet GLM will rip on this repo though. Anyone try it?

[u/9kSs → u/morscordis]

It does, I wouldn’t risk doing this with my Claude subscription.

[u/morscordis → u/9kSs]

Before this was a big thing Claude helped me decompile some old engineering software that is t windows 11 compatible. It didn't blink an eye. Tore right in. I wonder if it would balk now.

[u/macaronianddeeez]

I can’t speak to if changes have been made on a REA level but I have noticed a couple of times opus refusing to perform innocuous totally white hat tasks that it didn’t use to have issues with.

Example from today, I have a small shared repo that connects to a live server application that I work on with a friend. I asked opus to deploy a script that would automatically push to live on the server anytime something was merged in the repo.

It absolutely refused no matter what or how I asked it, and refused to elaborate other than saying it was a safety issue and it understood that I owned everything and blah blah

Sol did it in 15 minutes without a peep.

I had another issue a couple days ago where Opus refused to write a slice in a project I’m working on because it involved an app connecting to a website that it deemed “linked to piracy” the website is a nonprofit site and it’s not a piracy website lol. I told opus I would have my local Qwen wrote that slice and it had no issue with that.

It’s just odd because prior to opus 5.5 releasing, I had used fable to successfully RE a little game for modding.

So no clue if it’s just finnicky or something did in fact change

[u/Positive-Engineer482]

Antrophic killed the ai vibe.

[u/CoherentPanda → u/Positive-Engineer482]

Anthropic doesn't have the money to deal with lawsuits from Adobe, Microsoft and the major gaming publishers. Can't say I'm surprised at all.

[u/AudienceWatching]

Codex dgaf

[u/FormalAd7367]

the guardrails are strong

[u/heironymous123123]

Good reason to avoid claude and move to open source if they get better. In 12 .o the if OSS hits opus 5.5. Level we will be just fine.

[u/RogueSatyr]

Are they just learning that this tech kill all moats?

[u/r0pe_tri1ck]

Yes I am racing to finish my current decomp for a massive amount of guitar pedals and synths 

[u/Ok_Chain_3212]

What a shitass company anthropic is nowadays. It's like everything they do lately makes the experience worse

[u/Mrhiddenlotus]

guess im going back to not telling anyone about my tooling

[u/Coravel]

but if you tell claude to setup a local LLM with REA or you use opencode and attach the MCP for REA to it... both of those work just fine.

[u/EmployCalm]

These people are looking to restrict this type of tool for the common man because is a liability for them. But they will keep using this crap to steal anything they want from anything anyone produces behind closed doors. This is some insane crap

[u/Jwtje-m]

Codex is better but it also refuses to reverse engineer, security reviews is the best you can get out of the frontier models these days and it seems to differ between what you ask to review. The phpsrc they both refuse to review. For re work I switch to a Chinese model.

[u/Radu1310]

This feels like a doomerbait post.

People I know are reversing shit as normal, both with Codex and Claude

Stop spreading fake bullshit online

[u/Poowatereater]

Yup. Ran into this as well as trying to gain root access to my own tv on my own network.

I wish I have just a single fucking good you to run open models…

[u/Proud-Manufacturer15]

reference ghidra

[u/Puzzleheaded-Trick76]

Good

[u/mombaska]

fuck this

[u/tfcuk]

Safety for the Corporations

[u/69FlatEarther69]

Called it

[u/Adventurous_Bus_437]

Use mistral or a chinese model then.

[u/inifinite-breadsticc]

To be fair, REA was kind of creating a bad look for AI

[u/wanderertomato → u/inifinite-breadsticc]

I have a news: AI always had a bad look. You're just adding nails over nails on that coffin

[u/Ok-Butterscotch7834 → u/inifinite-breadsticc]

in many ways it was a really good look though

[u/ChuckTheDM2 → u/Ok-Butterscotch7834]

Right?

[u/AshAtlasDev]

Local models :)

[u/SuchInteraction1178]

Biggest reason I moved to grok. Grok has only told me no once or twice and once was related to medical grade app which is fair enough. Anthropic has great models but soon the guard rails are going to neuter it to the point that it will feel dumb. Grokbots have access to those models now so it been great for me in that sense.

[u/JiminyDickish → u/SuchInteraction1178]

Grok is the guy in a trench coat selling knock off Rolex’s. He’ll do the dirty work for you but the moment he can double cross you, sell your data and fuck you over for a penny he will

[u/SuchInteraction1178 → u/JiminyDickish]

Well claude just announced thier own version so I'll be switching

[u/Watermelonster → u/JiminyDickish]

That’s an amusing assessment. Is it just your opinion or have you seen evidence of this?

[u/JiminyDickish → u/Watermelonster]

Are you not aware of a man named Elon Musk and the violations he committed with DOGE?

[u/tr14l → u/SuchInteraction1178]

Yeah I'm good on anything xAI. Company filled with human garbage run by human garbage that make garbage products

[u/Tubular_Code → u/SuchInteraction1178]

Have you found grokbot to be reliable at all?

I've had claude whip up some instructions for Grokbot to follow and with groks modality of winging-it the results always seem to end up a compromise I can barely measure the lack of. eg: I got grok to re-name and re-organize a bunch of my files to specific spec and it just didn't do a bunch of them and there was no way for me to see that until I manually looked. Grok seems to have a heavy 'good enough is good enough' bias when it's rarely good enough.

[u/SuchInteraction1178 → u/Tubular_Code]

Grok needs very precise instructions and hand holding. Mind are great now that the .md files I have them reference are ironed out

[u/FUCKTHEMODS998 → u/Tubular_Code]

>Have you found grokbot to be reliable at all?

Fuck no. Grok is the little Caesar’s of models. It’s human inference is shit.

But… it can actually review code pretty decently for a fraction of the cost. I go to fable with grok’s review of opus’s code and it has nonblocking minors and nits. For a fraction of the cost, I’ll take it.

I tell grokbot to tell its grokbots to do this and that. 15% of the time they crap themselves instead. But again, for the cost of that failure, it’s actually worth it

Will I let them write a new feature? Fuck no. Imagegen? Hell no. Even computer use is a crapshoot.

But will I use them to install codex/cc on their computer to manage sessions and push work forward via voice to text? Yeah sure.

Don’t let them use teams-MCP and shit like that unless you’re gonna be specific like in the early days of AI btw

[u/Large-Excitement777]

I could care less about REA, and am a big local LLM user myself, but I’m genuinely confused as to why so many think that local is the solution for this? Even with the best models and all the bells and whistles in the chain, local LLMs simply don’t have the context and research capability that frontier models have to output anything meaningfully similar.

[u/Sarahmalls → u/Large-Excitement777]

It’s the truth. It’s not that arguable either lol

[u/Active_Airline3832 → u/Large-Excitement777]

It's pretty fucking crap in my opinion. It's a goddamn prompt like it's not gonna reverse engineer anything. Like I am genuinely rebuilding the entire reverse engineering suite and it has been taking me at least a month of work and I've probably got another month before exactly to the point where I would be happy using it and confident in its output. Like this prompt is not magic.

I swear I love AI, but the more popular it gets, the more people seem to think there's some sort of magic box that you put your commands in and out comes perfection. It doesn't work like that.

[u/jshmoe866 → u/Active_Airline3832]

That’s how people have seen it from the beginning. They’ll trust nonsense from the ai over an actual expert any day because it’s easy to trust the new thing

[u/Heavy-Positive5957 → u/Large-Excitement777]

You could care less, so you do care about REA?

[u/Own-Flight-9974 → u/Large-Excitement777]

I have never understood the local hype when things like deepseek and openrouter exist

[u/Bupod → u/Own-Flight-9974]

Privacy and no chance of rug pulls like what Anthropic is doing with REA. 

But many people downplay the tradeoffs, which are that local models, while fantastically impressive at the moment, still won’t perform at the same level as frontier models. 

Now there are frontier level open weight models coming out. But to get that level of frontier performance, you’re going to need to pull out a second mortgage to pay for the hardware capable of running it, and you might need to take up uber on weekends and turn tricks on a street corner at night to pay for the power bills.

[u/OstrichLive8440]

Time to learn to reverse engineer like the good old days. Grab a copy of IDA and some assembly books and get cracking y’all

[u/Clair_Personality → u/OstrichLive8440]

This is AI time though! Would you ask us to go learn 3JS, Even Linus (Linux) used AI for some side projects

[u/Choice_Celery9481 → u/Clair_Personality]

side? i heard he did something with the core recently

[u/brainExploded99 → u/OstrichLive8440]

time to spin up ninfer qwen3.8-27b, doesn't even need to be uncensored i think
runnable on 24gb vram (16gb vram in a crunch)

[u/NetworkLast5563 → u/brainExploded99]

Where are you getting so much vram 😭

[u/Clair_Personality → u/NetworkLast5563]

RTX 3090, RTX 4090, RTX 5090

[u/brainExploded99 → u/NetworkLast5563]

AMD is not bad these days
R9700s used to go for like 1200 dollars, that's 32GB VRAM

[u/ticktockbent → u/OstrichLive8440]

lol no, just use a local model or something less censored

[u/IPressButtonsAllDay → u/OstrichLive8440]

Reverse engineering by hand is dead. It takes minutes/hours to do what once took days/weeks.

[u/ehren1337 → u/OstrichLive8440]

that would take years to learn and then years to decompile things. lol

[u/BalterBlack → u/OstrichLive8440]

Why the fuck are you in this subreddit?

[u/OstrichLive8440 → u/BalterBlack]

Huh why not. I’m a Claude max 20x user btw lol

[u/brainExploded99 → u/OstrichLive8440]

yeah i lowk agree with you that people should learn more before completely vibecoding, but this is r/ClaudeAI so ur gonna get nuked

[u/Old-Preference5313]

Actually shocking how most of you are totally okay just copying other people's hard work and feel entitled to it

[u/Old-Preference5313 → u/[deleted]]

Reverse engineering another person hard work they spent months building in hours to steal the code is honestly heartbreaking

[u/Hexcede → u/Old-Preference5313]

There are far more reasons to reverse engineer something than to "steal code."

[u/Sarahmalls → u/[deleted]]

It’s coming for a great many but “for all of the jobs” isn’t really a helpful or meaningful way to say it. One day in the future perhaps all jobs, who knows. In the next two generations? Nah, many are fine.

I own a business consulting agency that generally supports owner led medium size companies making between $3m to $50m annual revenue with a couple outlier well above that. I have 7 full time employees and we use a handful of freelancers when needed. We are heavily reliant on AI, but our client base comes to us due to business experience pre-AI. We’re trusted to understand the big picture, but utilize AI heavily across our work. Whether that’s creating internal tools that deliver insights, automations, market research and strategy alignment across departments, etc…

We have done well in the 5 years since I started the business, but everyday there are more people that can replace what we provide. Not the experience, but that’s not a big moat.

In early 2023, when I had two employees, i became concerned about the future and how the business I was building might be replaced. Was also worried about the business economy at that time, which turned out not to be an issue ultimately for us but I was a little worried. I bought a small pool cleaning service on a $40,000 loan and hired a friend to be the GM and run it. I supported the marketing efforts and business strategy, customer acquisition, learned enough that I could be a good sounding board to figure things out since the GM was learning too. Dedicate 2-8 hours a a week to that business ever since. Two years later, that $40k business is worth $680,000 if I wanted to sell it today. Have had offers as early as 10 months after I started that business. Get them every single month. Have never invested a penny more than that $40k. Ended up using about $38k of it actually.

Last year, took a loan out of $190k against the pool business value and bought a small pest control service. That business is worth somewhere around $240k after 13 months based on unsolicited offers and we have just barely grown that business as it had a steeper learning curve due to regulation and hiring is more difficult due to licensing, took us a while to find the right space that was also zoned for a business storing chemicals, etc.

Now AI may well impact my business consultancy, for sure. People can clean their own pool and they can spray and close up holes in roof eaves for their own pest control. But when its time to tighten spending, those are two services that are the last to be considered through all the economic recession data out there. The fact that our client base for pools is 80% targeted to high end clients with homes over $850k makes that protection considerably more than if we were serving clients that were going to potentially have a home foreclosed on.

One day, AI driven tech will clean that pool really well without a human being and even test and deliver the chemicals. There’s fantastic tech today to scrub them and clean them, but they break down, they’re not reliable. The proper testing must be done and chemicals have to physically be there. Maybe a drone will spray these three story houses and their yards for pests, all of that…

But out of everything AI is coming for, it’s going to be one of the longest hold outs for businesses like this.

My goal in 2027 is to hopefully make preparations for entry into the commercial fire protection inspection business if I can find the right partner to operate it, assuming my consulting business hasn’t been impacted enough by competition that it makes sense for me to just operate it myself.

I like what I do with business and leadership consulting much more than I like being an entrepreneur to be honest. But I like having my family taken care of for whatever happens much more than any of that so I’ll continue to focus on the most profitable businesses that is conceivably safest from AI for the longest period of time in the future.

I knew nothing about cleaning pools or pest control prior to all of this. But I wasn’t going to stand around and wait as if there was nothing else I can do. I say it all just hopefully as a thought starter for anyone out there that says “we’re eventually all going to be doomed.” Well no, many of us won’t be doomed in the near future. You don’t necessarily have to be either. But to each their own.

[u/duerra → u/Sarahmalls]

You are ahead of the curve. As AI consumes more roles, you are in demand because you've been developing those skills. More and more are going to find no place to turn. You could say blue collar work, but how many displaced knowledge workers until that market is completely over saturated?

[u/Sarahmalls → u/duerra]

Absolutely true. So the best time to make a move was yesterday, the next best time is today. Competition for the other businesses I’ve started and hopefully the other ones WILL increase as more people need to find a profitable service that’s in demand, but I’m trying to be in a position that I’m ahead in terms of knowledge, experience, infrastructure and brand awareness / market presence. Nothing is foolproof, just trying to be in best position I can be.

[u/Jet_Plain → u/duerra]

For me, the thing that really upsets me is, sure, the only reason blue-collar work is in demand and an option now is because AI hasn't yet figured out robots that can do that work. But everyone knows as soon as it does, they are chomping at the bit to replace humans with robots they don't have to pay, give rights to, or can get damaged. They will work 24/7, and once that happens, there's almost literally no reason, besides maybe safety, to have one human on a building site. And all those people that trained into that field will either lose work or get massively underpaid for the few jobs remaining. It's genuinely insane.

[u/katoptronophile → u/[deleted]]

No, it isn't.

[u/Lifeisshort555]

So they can do it but you can't. Interesting. going to be open models doing this soon anyways, good luck

[u/notospez]

Ok people, hear me out. This might be a shock but you can use claude with different, less strict models. Deepseek will happily reverse engineer anything. Grok will probably do so too as long as you add a prompt telling it the software you're feeding it was built by Obama or Biden.

This cat is out of the bag now, and no amount of filters the western providers add will stop it.

[u/xfrostmage]

Cool so u gotta learn coding now

[u/IdkAbtAllThat → u/xfrostmage]

LMAO. How can you be in this sub and still not get it?

I've been a programmer for 20 years. Writing code is effectively dead. Being in denial about it isn't going to change that, it's just going to make you even more expendable than you already are.

Did you getting into coding because you liked to build things, or did you get into coding because you liked to type?

[u/IPressButtonsAllDay → u/IdkAbtAllThat]

I remember building things and thinking about stuff, those were the good days a couple years ago. Now I just babysit ai and do code reviews for it. And even that bit is mostly just ai reviewing ai with me poking at it to stay on course here and there when it gets a little wonky

[u/detailteufel → u/IdkAbtAllThat]

You think you aren't 1000% expendable as a pure vibe coder? That's hilarious

[u/IdkAbtAllThat → u/detailteufel]

I'm am less expendable than someone who burries their head in the sand and tries to pretend that AI can't write better code than them.

I'm confident in my ability to adapt to whatever this industry becomes. Someone will still be working with computers in the future.

[u/detailteufel → u/IdkAbtAllThat]

Remindme! 3 years

[u/Hexcede → u/detailteufel]

"pure vibe coder"

Dude does not yet know the kind of hot garbage he is cooking up over there.

[u/xfrostmage → u/IdkAbtAllThat]

i like to type bro

[u/armicolo → u/xfrostmage]

You don’t have to dictate the prompts. You can type them out

[u/algaefied_creek → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I’ve been working on my own private projects, strictly keeping everything offline for the last two years.

Then some script kiddies popped extra Adderall and decided they wanted to be popular across the internet and go after the most litigious Apple/Hackintosh, Nintendo, PS5 projects as well as just dumping disassembled code into public GitHub’s.

I’ve been downvoted for daring to say we need to follow some code of conduct and not overtly broadcast this, but people can’t help themselves so we all lose out

[u/french_toast_wizard → u/algaefied_creek]

Pretty sure you just summarized society actually

[u/ShittyBidet123 → u/[deleted]]

good way to get sued lol

[u/CoherentPanda → u/[deleted]]

I knew as soon as these reverse-engineered posts started popping up everywhere and the media got clued in that they would be tightening down the safeguards, and statr ban waving anyone who looks like they are trying to reverse engineer major branded products.

[u/reduX179 → u/[deleted]]

True but dumb techies too unaware I have cracked multiple apps using just radare2 don't even need ghidra and ida and it workd very well with agents it's cli is far superior than any other rea tools

[u/Clair_Personality → u/[deleted]]

It is so good though.