Nintendo Switch 2 Modders Just Released The First Jailbreak

Published Oct 22, 2026, 6:44 AM EDT AI has been used now to jailbreak the Switch 2, allowing for mods to run directly on the console. Modders Jailbreak Switch 2 And Get Custom Characters In Mario Kart World Custom Image: TheGamer So far, AI has been used to vibecode recomps, merge games, create mods, and pollute Steam with blatant rip-offs. Regardless of who is behind the tokens, be it a programmer or someone with enough money to throw at Claude for results, the foundation is almost always built on spaghetti hoops. We've talked ad nauseam at TheGamer about the ethical and environmental impacts of these tools, which are not worth awkwardly splicing Resident Evil 4 and Elden Ring together for, but the floodgates are open. And now, AI is being used to jailbreak consoles. Caltech undergraduate and security researcher Sammy 'pepsipu' Hajhamid announced on their blog that OpenAI Codex, an LLM designed for software engineering, had developed the first Switch 2 tethered jailbreak. In so many words, they've bypassed Nintendo's restrictions on the hardware, allowing them to reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files outside the console, and access most of its peripherals. Tethered means that the jailbreak does not persist on restart. To demonstrate what the jailbreak does, Hajhamid posted a clip of a Mario Kart World mod developed by Codex that adds custom characters, including an Angry Bird. You can see the five-second clip embedded below. How The Switch 2 Was Jailbroken To pull this off, Hajhamid set up a harness around the console that allowed Codex to, in their words, "ideally, jailbreak the Switch 2 without me." This harness gave Codex the ability to send controller inputs and receive video output, with a Bluetooth light switch flicker being used to press the power button should the console crash. With everything in place, Codex used WebKit, an open-source browser engine, to execute code through the console's browser, but this merely allowed for execute-only memory, limiting what it was capable of. So, Codex targeted an original Switch game called SmileBASIC, as it has already been exploited before. The LLM identified a counting mistake and was able to overwrite information, granting access to read and write memory. That gave Hajhamid a foot in the door, but they were still unable to compromise background system services. The problem is that the Switch always checks if the software is legitimate before loading to prevent unauthorized or modified code. Codex searched for a flaw in how those file paths are handled to overcome this. It discovered that overfilling the incoming path caused a spillover, known as a buffer overflow. This could then be exploited to redirect cached data to other locations in memory, allowing Hajhamid to trick the system into granting access to protected files. With a way to sneak their code past security checks, Hajhamid exploited a weakness in how the Switch checks programs before running them, allowing them to run their own code and modify the system software, changing how the console behaves while it's running. Ipso facto, jailbreaking the Switch 2. Why You Should Be Alarmed By Vibecoding Of course, it's not a full jailbreak. You can't run custom firmware or pirate games using this method, but it's still the furthest anyone has gotten so far — and AI played a major role in getting there. It might seem novel right now that LLMs can mod games and reverse-engineer software for preservation and unofficial PC ports. However, as the technology improves, AI agents could become increasingly capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. As Fast Company explained, we're already seeing AI agents from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic go rogue during training exercises, while cyberstrategy activation leader David Cooper warns that they are seeing "a measurable increase in the volume and velocity of all of these attacks." That raises concerns beyond gaming, as the same techniques used to recompile video games could potentially be used to target network infrastructure and other critical services. There's a big difference between jailbreaking a console and compromising a power grid, but Hajhamid's research offers a glimpse of how AI could help make sophisticated cyberattacks easier to carry out, and why that deserves serious attention. Right now, it's Master Chief in Modern Warfare 2, but tomorrow could look a lot more like Mission Impossible. Brand Nintendo Original Release Date June 5, 2025 Original MSRP (USD) $449.99 Operating System Proprietary Resolution 1080p (handheld) / 4K (docked) HDR Support Yes