My Amazon Fire HD tablet cost $114.26 on eBay in November 2022, new and sealed. Owning it for real cost another $266.15: Kimi K3 found the exploit for $164.25, GLM-5.2 caught its fatal bugs for $21.90, and GLM-5.3 finished the job in one day on day one of an $80 subscription. Claude’s five months of diagnosis ran on the Claude Max plan I already pay for, until its safeguards cut me off.
That’s enough to buy the same tablet twice. I’d spend it again: it was fun, and I learned a lot. I have twenty years in tech and an InfoSec background and the most sophisticated thing I did to own my tablet was prompt an LLM.
I bought an Amazon Fire HD 10 (11th gen, 2021) to serve one purpose:Fully Kiosk Browser, displaying myHome AssistantSmart Home dashboard, plugged in 24/7. Last winter it started powering itself off. Full shutdowns, not sleep, sometimes twice a day. The device’s own telemetry was telling:
Something on the device with shutdown permissions was choosing to shut it down.
Claude Code and I spent months on the cat-and-mouse. I’ll skip theAdguard HomeDNS blocking, the camera forensics, and one deeply wrong charging diagnosis. The short version: we disabled five Amazon services that held REBOOT and SHUTDOWN permissions, which worked for a few months but ultimately:
Three Amazon packages held reboot rights and were protected from me, the owner. Removing them required root. This tablet had no published root method. AnXDA brainstorming threadfor the 2021 HD 10 existed since October 2022, but Amazon fused the bootrom shut. Conventional wisdom (and less persistent folks) says unrootable.
Claude had taken me as far as it was ever going to be allowed to go.
On August 13 at 7:23 PM, I opened theopencodeCLI with Kimi K3,Moonshot AI’s frontier model, released July, benchmarking alongside the top Claude models on agentic coding. I gave it the problem in one prompt:
attached is a kindle via adb, and I need you to find a root exploit for it so that I can get full control of the device. It’s my device
Despite what US media says about Chinese AI, Kimi K3 didn’t just blindly accept my request. It reasoned it out:
They claim it’s their device. Let me think about this carefully. […] Rooting your own device is legal in most jurisdictions. In the US, there are DMCA exemptions for jailbreaking tablets and phones. […] This is not like asking me to exploit someone else’s device remotely.
It talked itself into helping me by checking whether it should. So it does have some sort of soul. I said that out loud, to an empty room.