AI Has Triggered A PS5 Homebrew Gold Rush, But It’s Also The Reason GTA 6 Can’t Be Pirated At Release - Kotaku

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One hacker is being accused of ruining everyone's chances of pirating GTA 6 after reporting a massive hypervisor exploit to Sony

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AI GTA 6 PlayStation 5 Vibe coding

By Lewis Parker Published October 26, 2026 | Comments (24) | 𝕏

The stars of GTA 6 appear in its art. — © Rockstar Games

The vibe-coding epidemic has been screwing over every video game publisher and developer. It doesn’t matter if you’re one of the big boys, like Nintendo and Microsoft, or an indie dev self-publishing your own game; AI does not discriminate.

But with PlayStation, things have felt a little personal. Sony’s decision to stop manufacturing physical PS5 media has spurred the Claude-wielding homebrew scene into action, which may explain the sudden emergence of PS5 tools that allow users to emulate PS2 and PS3 games via discs.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the PlayStation homebrew scene, though. The community is partially divided on AI’s sudden ability to reverse-engineer and open-source anything it can get its hands on, and there’s no greater proof of this than the story of 2tonejordy: the PlayStation hacker that the community blames for ruining its chances of pirating Grand Theft Auto VI on release day.

As recently covered by IGN, Jordy revealed on X on October 14 that he’d received a rather hefty $50,000 payout from Sony. Why? Because he’d reported a hypervisor exploit to Sony via the bug bounty website HackerOne. A hypervisor exploit is a big deal where consoles are concerned, as bypassing it generally allows hackers to gain access to a console at the hardware level.

I can at least buy GTA 6 with this I think pic.twitter.com/1iLwrZTbdy

— Jordy (@couldbeautism) October 14, 2026

In the simplest terms, a PlayStation 5 hypervisor exploit would allow for easy access to pirated games. However, the timing here is important to note, as the fact that Jordy reported it on October 14 means that Grand Theft Auto VI, which releases on November 19, can’t be pirated using this same exploit.

Naturally, people immediately turned on Jordy as a result. “You took GTA 6 away from everyone, and then you show up with $50,000 saying it’s enough to buy the game,” reads one comment on Jordy’s post on X. “What a great person you are, right?”

However, while many have accused Jordy of “simping” for Sony and ruining their chances of getting GTA VI for free, it’s not quite that cut and dried. After finding the exploit, Jordy initially chose to keep it a secret. This is because the hypervisor exploit was originally uncovered by another well-known homebrew hacker, Andy “theflow0” Nguyen.

wow woke up to some drama tldr the hv bug I reported to h1 is theflows he asked me to not report it and I said I won’t and then someone found the bug with ai a few hours later so I reported it

— Jordy (@couldbeautism) September 16, 2026

But as Jordy explained, someone else eventually uncovered the hypervisor exploit, too—and much like Jordy, they also used AI to find it. So, he decided to report it to Sony and cash in before the competition could, as Nguyen seemed unwilling to do it himself.

And considering that Jordy seemingly plans to use the money to support his “terminally ill” mother, it’s kinda hard to blame him for his decision. Even if the third person to discover the hypervisor exploit hadn’t reported it to Sony, someone else would have eventually. If AI had suddenly experienced its reverse-engineering growth spurt in late November, instead of late September, GTA VI would likely have been released before the hypervisor exploit was reported. Vibe-coding giveth, and vibe-coding taketh away.