AI helped a hacker sell out the PS5 to Sony for $50,000

Sony paid $50,000, the top reward in its HackerOne bug bounty program (a platform where companies pay for reported vulnerabilities), to a hacker called Jordy, known as 2tonejordy. He found a flaw in the PS5 hypervisor, the layer that walls off the console's normal system from its most protected memory. The bug affects firmware 13.60 through 14.00 and gives kernel-level access, enough to run unsigned code and boot Linux on the console.

The twist: he didn't hunt for it by hand. Jordy told IGN he found the bug with generative AI.

The scandal comes from the fact that the hole wasn't new. According to Jordy, Andy Nguyen, known as theflow0 (a Google security engineer and one of the biggest names in PS5 hacking), found it back in 2025 and kept it quiet for his PS5 Linux project. The plan was to wait until November 19, when GTA 6 comes out, so players could update for the game and still keep the ability to boot Linux. Jordy first agreed to stay silent, but then another researcher found the same bug, also with AI. "If I and another person can find it with LLM, so can someone else," he told IGN, and filed the report with Sony.

His payout post ("I can at least buy GTA with this I think") hit 1.8 million views, per IGN, and the homebrew scene turned on him. Nguyen announced he is stopping work on PS5 Linux, including planned PS5 Pro support. Sony shipped firmware 14.20 on October 21, which patches the flaw.

A rare bug used to be something you could sit on for months until the right moment. Now several people find it in parallel with a chatbot, and whoever hits send first wins.