OpenAI’s Roon says Codex has no reverse engineering ban, accidental blocks being fixed

OpenAI’s AI coding tool Codex does not prohibit reverse engineering. That is according to OpenAI researcher Roon, who addressed the issue directly on X. Roon also said that cases where Codex refused to help users remove software from their own devices were accidental, and that those blocks are being fixed. What Roon actually said The clarification landed on X on October 26, 2026, at around 00:43 UTC. Roon’s message had two parts. First, Codex has no policy against reverse engineering. Second, the refusals users had run into around stripping software off devices were not intentional, and OpenAI is working to correct them. Users flagged instances where the tool blocked requests tied to removing malware or cleaning up devices. The criticism that set it off Roon’s comments did not arrive in a vacuum. On October 25, 2026, open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond publicly called out both OpenAI and Anthropic. Raymond is a well-known name in open-source circles, so his criticism carries weight with exactly the developer audience these AI coding tools are trying to win. According to the research summary of the episode, the restrictions on Codex were unintentional and stemmed from safety filter...