The ongoing fallout from yesterday’s PHP vulnerability and patching continues to dominate headlines, with AI credited for both discovering the serious 20-year-old flaw, and for exploiting it in the moments after the patch was released. Now, word is out that the Nintendo Switch 2 has been jailbroken just 16 months after its original launch, again thanks to AI.
WCCF Tech reports that the new exploit is based on a discovery made back in July, a so-called “userland exploit,” which allowed external code to be run within a specific app or game. That was a significant dent in Nintendo’s defenses, but not yet a way to allow piracy. However, this latest discovery takes things a stage further, with an in-software hack now allowing users to mod games, install homebrew (and therefore potentially pirated games), and download save files. Centro Leaks reposted a video clip from someone claiming to be a jailbreaker in which they show characters like Peter Griffin and Hatsune Miku modded into Mario Kart World.
BREAKING: SWITCH 2 HAS BEEN HACKED (BY AI!), FIRST JAILBREAK RELEASED https://t.co/DzTLzai44g
— Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) October 22, 2026
The individual responsible claims to have used OpenAI Codex to co-create the hack, and says it took “substantial effort” for around two weeks to achieve, using a setup that looks like a Rube Goldberg device. The method requires running a specific backward-compatible Switch 1 game in order to take advantage of the previous exploit, and this needs to be done every time the Switch 2 is launched. Which is to say, it’s still a ways off from being a commonplace way in which people will jailbreak their Switches for piracy. The person responsible has also publicly identified the e-store game which is being used, says WCCFT, so Nintendo can remove it fairly easily.
These attempts are always portrayed as being a means to run “homebrew” games on closed systems, and while there are undeniably large homebrew communities out there who want to create and play games on the Switch 2, it’s always far more motivated by piracy. If you can install a homemade game, you can also install a ROM of an official release.
The initial version of the Switch 1 was also pretty quickly cracked, but in that case via hardware and in such a way that Nintendo couldn’t patch out. That was a far more serious vulnerability for Nintendo, which could only repair the issue in further manufacturing of the console, leaving those launch versions of the Switch 1 still able to be jailbroken today. And Nintendo came down on those selling pre-jailbroken Switches hard. This isn’t that, but it is the first big crack in the armor and will inevitably be further explored, and that’s a process that’s far easier today thanks to the willingness of AI models to merrily poke at the code looking for weaknesses far faster than humans ever could.
It’s worth noting that the Switch 2’s backward compatibility was taken advantage of almost immediately after the release of the Switch 2, when Switch 1 ROM carts were quickly adapted to run older games on the new device, but Nintendo was able to detect this use and ban the users from their own devices. This latest trick is said to be able to evade Nintendo’s online checks.
We’re still a ways off from custom firmware, given the current exploit is “tethered” (the modification isn’t permanent, and has to be performed every time), but Nintendo will certainly already be exploring ways to update its own firmware in ways that could combat the techniques. We’ve reached out to Nintendo to ask for comment.