AI helped crack the Switch 2, and Mario Kart already runs on an iPhone

The Nintendo Switch 2 held out for more than a year, then fell in a very modern way. Security researcher Sammy Hajhamid, known online as Pepsipu, spent about two weeks pointing OpenAI Codex at the interpreter inside the old SmileBasic 4 app using a homemade rig: commands over USB, video over HDMI, power cycling through a smart switch. The AI found an integer overflow when removing items from an array, and from there Hajhamid worked his way to memory access and running his own code. The ns2jb exploit went public last week, and for now it is a partial jailbreak, not full control of the console.

That was enough to dump games. Emulator developer Will Faust showed Mario Kart World on a Mac on October 27, and on October 28 he posted a two and a half minute clip of the same game racing on an iPhone 18 Pro. This is not CPU emulation: the Switch 2 and Apple hardware both run on ARM, so his private fork of the nxnative project translates the console's system calls to iOS and Nintendo's NVN2 graphics to Apple Metal. The game needs just under 6.5 GB of physical memory, with some data pushed into a file, swap style.

It is still rough: geometry goes missing, colors break, and after the Mac clip plenty of people called it fake. Separately, a modified Eden emulator booted Splatoon Raiders, though real gameplay there is a long way off. Faust says he will not release the code.

Verdict: a console Nintendo spent years locking down was opened in a couple of weeks with an AI helper. It only gets faster from here.