A developer posted a screenshot on Reddit this week. His Android TV used to crawl. Sponsored tiles in the launcher, telemetry phoning home, menus that took a second to react to every button press. Now it runs like an Apple TV. He pointed Claude Code at the box over ADB and told it to strip out the bloatware. That was it.

This is what AI is fantastic at, opening up opportunities for those that can dream up the problems needing to be solved. The average person 5 years ago, would never have thought of rewriting their Smart TV software due to the sheer learning required to do so. Now it’s less than evening’s project.

TechCrunch ran the story and Tom’s Hardware followed. It is a good story. Then I went back to Reddit and read the comments, and the mood changed.

The Bans

As more people try this, the same kind of post keeps turning up. Somebody asked an AI agent to do something to their own hardware, got a refusal, pushed again, and later found the account flagged or suspended. I have not verified every one of these, and some will be people leaving out the bit where they did something daft. But there are enough of them now that it is a pattern. This thread in r/aiwars is one example, and it is about ChatGPT, not Claude. So this is not one vendor having a bad week.

The policy language is there if you want it. Anthropic publishes its safeguards, warnings and appeals page, and it is written broadly enough to cover almost anything a lawyer wants it to cover.

Here is the part that gets me. Nobody is attacking anything. A man wants to remove an ad launcher from a television he paid for and put in his living room. That is the whole crime.

Fair Is Fair

There is a reasonable defence and I should give it. ADB access, bypassing protections and modifying firmware sit very close to things that cause real harm. A vendor that lets its agent do anything on any device is a vendor that gets sued the first time it bricks something or helps someone break into something. Blanket caution is cheap. Judging each case is expensive.

I accept all of that. It still does not explain why the line lands on a man deleting an ad package from his own TV. A classifier that cannot tell that apart from an attack is a classifier that has been tuned for the vendor’s comfort, not for the user. And the vendor’s comfort tends to line up neatly with the comfort of the companies selling the TVs.

The Cognitive Lease

We have never had a coding tool tell us no. A compiler does not care what the program is for. An IDE does not read your commit and decide it dislikes the politics. You could write whatever you liked and the tool did what it was told.

AI agents change that. When you hand your thinking to one, you are not buying a tool. You are renting reasoning capacity from a company, on terms they can rewrite, and they can end the arrangement without asking you. I call that a cognitive lease. You get the output while you stay inside the lines. You lose it when the landlord decides you have crossed one.

Think about what that does to the old argument that a human employee might refuse too. They might, and you can hire another one. You cannot hire another Claude. The refusal is in the weights, the weights belong to somebody else, and the account is the only door.

Who Owns the Box

The TV is the same story from the other direction. You think you own the plastic, the glass and the silicon. What you own is a licence to a device built to serve an advertiser. The manufacturer wants the tracking on and the ads in the launcher. Removing them breaks the business model, and that is why the debloat story went round at all.

Now put the two together. The hardware vendor has locked the device down, and the AI vendor will not help you unlock it. Neither of them cares about your reasons. Both of them have an interest in you leaving things as they are.

The Move Local

The people in those Reddit threads are not arguing about it for long. They are installing Qwen and other open weights models. Local models are slower than the big hosted ones and they need real hardware. They also carry their own safety tuning, which is more or less strong depending on who trained them.

What they do not have is an account to ban. Nobody reads your prompts. Nobody changes the terms on a Tuesday. For a job like debloating a television, a model that is a bit slower and does what it is told beats a clever one that might lock you out.

I expect two tiers to form. One is the hosted tier, convenient and capable and moderated, with an account behind it. The other is the local tier, rougher and entirely yours. Most people will use both. The question is which one you let your business depend on.

What To Do About It

If your product, your pipeline or your team depends on one AI provider, you are a tenant. Check your lease.

Build on a layer that lets you swap the model underneath. Keep your prompts, your tools and your test cases in your own repository, not in a vendor’s console. Run a local model for anything you cannot afford to have switched off, and test that it actually works before the day you need it.

The vendors know loyalty to any given model is close to zero, which is why they push their own tooling so hard. Do not let a convenience feature become a dependency.

Own your hardware. Own your stack. Then nobody can serve notice when you decide to flash your smart kettle.

P.S. Marge helped review the post. Gemini produced the “Men In Black (2019)” image, and Facebooks Muse the coder at the table.