**Before I start, let me issue some disclaimers, since I really like this one to be a real discussion rather than a warfield:**
*1. I'm aware of the recent lawsuit against voices38, and I don't want to do anything that can make stuff worse. So dear moderators, if you see anything that can be a bit dangerous, please edit it instead of removing it. I'd like to see what people have to say.*
*2. I'm not here to advocate for AI in stuff. I'm asking, simply because the pandora box is not just open, the box itself already got obliterated. With all the recent decomps and stuff, I believe it's something inevitable in cracking scene, the usage of agentic LLMs. So keep that in mind.*
*3. My knowledge on cybersecurity is zero, also my knowledge on CompSci. I'm not going to make guesses based on these, but my experiences as a passerby user who's checking the scene on and off since 2015, who's also spent time reading a bit about 2000s DRM cracking scene. So if I get something wrong, I'd appreciate learning, and let my mistake be a lesson for people like me who are uninformed.*
With all that in mind, I'm presenting my thouhts, and concerns.
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I don't need to inform you on what agentic AIs are doing in general, in regards to software development, and homebrew scenes. So I won't bother on writing about it, for the sake of my own time, and yours. I'm jumping ahead to what's related about cracking protections on videogames.
LLMs have become very good on decompilation, and documenting the inner workings of softwares, by assessing the disassembled code. Now, in the videogame sector, apart from game decompilation (pre-late 2026 AI craze, and even before that, the announcement of Super Mario 64 decompilation), I believe one can say the only place that the ordinary people would've heard about disassembled codes and debugging tools, were PC cracking areas. But right now, everyone in their basement are doing Ghidra exports and using various agents on Claude to game-mix, or de/recompile games. Not to mention reverse engineering the entire subscription suite softwares.
We speak for hours about the ramifications of this revolution (good or bad, you have to say the shift in the paradigm is immense, on a magnitude which you can no longer categorise it as a 'movement') and what's next. But this wave haven't reached the cracking scene yet (keyword: 'yet'!). And I'm not going to argue why it hasn't been.
But I'd like to ask you how it can be used. And I know one of the reasons, perhaps the most obvious, is that you can't write a prompt for Claude Code that "Hey Claude, please remove this DRM from my recently released commercial game"! As it won't respond. Hence, my first prediction for the usage of LLMs in cracking would be:
The development of agents based on open-weighted models which could run locally (a la Kimi LLM models, Deepseek, etc.), or using countermeasures to trick the big AI agents to do the bidding for the cracker.
Then, my next question:
How could the agents help on documentations about the DRMs? Would there be an influx of public knowledge on old DRMs? Lest not forget the retro gaming community, who might in their works on making games more accessible, delve into this territory. In this case, we're talking about legacy DRMs. There are still games that won't work on the recent Windows (10+), or on other OS via translation layers. Also, due to API obsolescence (the best example would be older games using pre D3D9, which won't work past Win7), there would be a demand to modernize the engines using decompilation, and implementations.
I believe in this endeavour, there could be an influx of \[X DRM\]-removers (I'm not naming the DRMs out of safety concerns) for older programs. This is my second prediction.
And this, might even start something on newer solutions. Or even reverse engineering the cracking solutions themselves. Just saying, there won't be long till someone digs and finds out how CPY circumvented Dat-Nasty-Virus (you know what I mean!) with just two .dll files! Or even with that, we have a CODEX repacked crack of a game with Dat-Nasty-Virus on it, an LLM would easily tell you how they did it, and what was removed.
That's my third prediction: floodgates could be opened on Dat-Nasty-Virus cracking scene. Tools gallore, all the stuff.
And this one is a double-edged sword:
One edge: easier gateway into pest removal and preservation;
And the other edge: you know how some people always use these opportunities to push fake cracks, spywares, and etc. This would be a problem.
Also, I believe the next anti-tampering measures would be anti-agentic AI measures, which would only invade our devices more. This is what that terrifies me.
At the end, I believe the PC cracking community should talk about it, set rules and boundaries, different gatekeepings and safer channels. Since Piracy has entered an new golden age, there would be shifts in paradigms. I believe if the scene doesn't think of it's ramifications, the wave of changes would destroy what it has built. I'm not a coder, but my interest has always been sociology and history. I see the change, and I believe things could be done to make stuff safer.
tl;dr: LLMs are helping reverse engineering, and there would be a short time before it takes cracking scene. I predict there would be special LLMs outside of online chatbots made for it; there would be a plethora of documentations and tools made with agentic AIs for legacy DRMs in modernizing older games for the newer OS; and there might be an influx of Dat-Nasty-Virus cracking developments. In the end, I believe people should talk about this, and how it can change the scenes, *before it's too late!*
