A Hacker Pointed OpenAI's Codex at the Nintendo Switch 2, and Two Weeks Later the Console Was Jailbroken

Nintendo's most locked down console has its first software jailbreak, and the first thing its creator did with it was put Peter Griffin in Mario Kart World.

Sammy Hajhamid, a developer known online as pepsipu, posted on X on October 22 that he had "jailbroke the nintendo switch 2" and modded Cinnamoroll, Peter Griffin, Hatsune Miku "and more" into the Switch 2 exclusive racer. The bigger story is how he got there. He says OpenAI's Codex did a lot of the bug hunting.

A rig built so the AI could work alone

In his own write-up, dated October 18, Hajhamid calls the exploit ns2jb, "a software-only, tethered jailbreak for the Switch 2," and adds: "To my knowledge, it's the first such exploit for the Switch 2." It works on system software 23.0.1, the latest version when he published.

His first move was not to hunt for bugs at all. "The very first thing I did was set up a harness around the Switch 1 and 2 so Codex could, ideally, jailbreak the Switch 2 without me," he writes. JetKVM boxes let Codex send controller inputs over USB and watch the screen over HDMI. When the console crashed, a Bluetooth light switch gadget from Amazon physically pressed the Switch 2's power button to bring it back.

That does not mean the AI did it alone. Hajhamid later said the "make no mistakes" prompt in his post was "just a silly caption." His first goal for Codex, code execution through the console's browser, did not succeed. "The jailbreak itself took substantial effort for ~2 weeks," he wrote.

The way in was a BASIC app

The browser is where everyone attacks. Codex claimed a control flow hijack using an old WebKit bug, but it did not generalize, and Hajhamid suspects Nintendo's bug bounty and WebKit's accessibility had already drawn plenty of hunters before him.

So he went sideways, to Switch 1 games that run on the Switch 2. He picked SmileBASIC, a BASIC interpreter that sells for about $25 on the eShop and had already been hacked on the 3DS. Codex found an integer overflow in the interpreter's array handling that gave memory read and write access.

From there, a buffer overflow in the console's built in filesystem service handed over privileged filesystem access. Hajhamid dumped internal storage and system code so Codex could pick it apart offline. A final logic flaw let him swap in his own code after the system's signature checks had already passed.

The result lets native code run as any ordinary system module and as the filesystem module itself. That opens the door to homebrew, reverse engineering, game mods, save file backups and access to most peripherals. It is not custom firmware, and it is not persistent: reboot the console and it is gone.

Nintendo's next move

The Mario Kart World mod, Hajhamid says, was "entirely vibecoded in a day." His wider hope is bigger. "I'm hopeful this will help the homebrew community make progress toward CFW," he writes, adding that he is "excited to see all the upcoming Switch 2 homebrew, emulation, and modding."

Nintendo has a long record of fighting hackers and pirates in court, and XDA called publishing the details "a bold move." The likely response is technical: Nintendo could pull SmileBASIC 4 from the eShop or push a firmware patch. Hajhamid seems to expect that. His list of next steps includes porting the exploit to the browser, which Nintendo cannot withdraw the way it can an eShop title. He says the exploit also works on the original Switch, though it is not packaged yet.

The timing is notable too. The Switch 2 crack lands just after a PlayStation 5 jailbreak that runs PS2 emulators with original discs, Digital Trends and XDA noted, so both big console makers now have holes to plug.

What changes is who does the grunt work. Console hacking has always been a cat and mouse game measured in months of patient crashing and rebooting. Hajhamid handed much of that to an agent with a robot finger on the power button, the same shift that let XBOW build a full chain Chrome exploit with a public OpenAI model. Nintendo's opponents just got a lot more patient.

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