Four AI models spend $266 to root an Amazon Fire tablet and delete bloatware

APPSO · wechat · 2026-09-13

When his Fire HD 10 kept auto-shutting down due to undeletable Amazon software with no public root method, Eric Pardee chained four AI models to crack it. Claude handled early diagnosis but its safety policies blocked kernel exploit work. Kimi K3 picked the CVE-2022-38181 GPU driver vulnerability and spent 30 hours and $164 building an exploit — 500+ failed reboots. GLM-5.2 ($21.90) fixed two bugs and suspected a hardware cache-coherency wall. GLM-5.3 found a fixed address offset between the kernel build and the firmware image, gained root in 8h5m, and reproduced it in 4 minutes.

Total added cost: $266.15, excluding the existing Claude Max subscription. Pardee's takeaways: buying a device ≠ owning it; a model's capability ≠ what users are allowed to use (Anthropic restricts exploit work even on your own hardware); models differ sharply on hard technical tasks; and verifying, handing off, and retrying across models is part of using AI well.

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