ai and ml

A poke in the AI with a sharp stick

Now that LLMs can help analyze commercial software binaries and recreate their functionality, one software developer and student has created a project designed to make this process more difficult.

Timo Zhang's project is called Blind LLM Agents (BLA), and as its name suggests, it attempts to interfere with efforts by AI agents to scrutinize app code.

"Coding agents can reverse-engineer shipped packages, CLIs, and WASM in minutes," Zhang told The Register in an email. "Classic obfuscation was built for humans and static tools, not LLMs that reason about meaning. Blind LLM Agents is a protection layer for that threat model."

Such agents can also help developers build alternatives to existing commercial software.

Last month, Artcraft , a two-person development shop, released seven open-source apps that aim to be replacements for Adobe's commercial apps Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.…