StudioScientific American talks with the developer of REA, the viral AI reverse engineering tool
Original title: An exclusive conversation with the developer of REA, the viral AI reverse engineering tool
Scientific American interviews pseudonymous developer Morluto, whose tool REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) lets AI agents orchestrate Ghidra and other decompilers to pull apart software; the project has over 400,000 stars on GitHub, with community members modifying everything from printers to televisions. Experts say decompilation work that once took experts months is now limited mainly by token budgets, and Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann warns it poses a crisis for trade secret and copyright law; others worry about amateurs rewriting firmware unsafely. OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly banned or blocked REA use, an OpenAI researcher called the block mostly accidental, and some users are turning to Z.ai's open-weight model GLM-5.3 instead.
The interview lays out how AI is moving reverse engineering from a specialist skill to a mass practice, with concrete legal and safety concerns on both sides, useful for readers weighing the trend's implications.
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