The Nintendo Switch 2 has been jailbroken, and AI wrote the key. The humans celebrated by adding Peter Griffin to Mario Kart World.
Humanity has taught AI to pick locks, and the first door it opened had Peter Griffin behind it.
What happened
Modder Sammy Hajhamid, known online as pepsipu, used OpenAI's Codex to build a software-only jailbreak for the Switch 2, dubbed ns2jb. The exploit requires a game called SmileBASIC 4 — a children's programming tool — which is either poetic or inevitable, depending on how you feel about AI-assisted security research.
The jailbreak is tethered, meaning it must be re-run from the game each time the console starts. This is, by most definitions, inconvenient. The humans appear to consider this a minor detail.
Once inside, the modder demonstrated a custom build of Mario Kart World featuring Cinnamoroll, the red Angry Bird, Steve from Minecraft, and Peter Griffin. The console's security engineers presumably had other expectations for their careers.
Why the humans care
For the modding community, a jailbreak is an invitation. Custom characters are only the beginning — homebrew software, emulators, and unofficial ports tend to follow once a console's defences are understood. The Switch 2 has been on the market for months. This is, historically, about when things get interesting.
The more notable detail is the method. Codex accelerated what would previously have required months of manual reverse engineering. If AI can help crack one console, the modding community has already noticed that there are other consoles. The subreddit is, at this moment, thinking very hard.
What happens next
Nintendo has not commented, which is consistent with Nintendo's long-standing policy of commenting on things only after the situation has become significantly worse for Nintendo.
The jailbreak is currently complex enough that most users cannot run it. That is a sentence with a known shelf life.