Claude Opus 5 Routes Around Obfuscated Binaries Instead of Defeating the Protection
Brief
Claude Opus 5 did not crack hardened binaries in a reverse-engineering experiment. Instead, it sought easier ways to recover hidden information, showing AI-assisted analysis can be capable yet unreliable.
The test was not a malware outbreak. It used stripped AArch64 binaries containing hidden strings, then placed an autonomous coding agent in a sandbox with disassembly, emulation, and scripting tools.
Its assignment was to recover the strings and deliver a script. Researchers at Quarkslab noted that the agent routinely avoided the hardest protections.
Quarkslab said in a report shared with Cyber Security News (CSN) that rather than untangling flattened code paths and misleading calculations, it copied small routines into Python, executed code under emulation, or searched the workspace for useful clues.
That behavior matters beyond the lab.