A CTO friend of ours put it bluntly over chai last month: "We spent three years and a few crore building this engine. Now an AI can explain it to anyone in an afternoon?"
He wasn't exaggerating much. Tools like REA ("Reverse Engineer Anything"), an open-source MCP that lets AI agents analyse apps down to the native binary, make deep software analysis available to anyone who can type a question.
We're builders ourselves at Devaigo, and we like open tools. But we also think companies have real, fair concerns. So we went back through the history to see what actually happened the last few times this fight came up.
The old cases, from the company's side
1983: Apple v. Franklin (US). Franklin sold Apple II clones with copies of Apple's operating system code. The court ruled that software in ROM and object code is protected by copyright. Lesson: understanding a product is one thing; copying its code is another, and courts punish it.
1992: Atari v. Nintendo. Atari's engineers wanted to bypass Nintendo's lock-out chip. To do it, they got Nintendo's source code from the US Copyright Office using a false statement about a lawsuit. The court said reverse engineering can be fair use, but Atari lost anyway, because of how it got the code. Method matters.
1998: the DMCA, Section 1201. The US made it illegal, in most cases, to break technical protections (like encryption or DRM), even when the end goal might be lawful. Many countries followed with similar rules. India added anti-circumvention provisions (Section 65A) to its Copyright Act in 2012.
2003: Bowers v. Baystate. A US court upheld a software licence that banned reverse engineering. In other words, what you agree to in the terms can take away rights you'd otherwise have.
2010s: the game-cheat and app-clone wave. Popular mobile games in India and abroad were decompiled within days of launch, leading to cloned apps, cheat tools and modded versions that hurt revenue and fair play. Studios now spend heavily on anti-tamper protection for exactly this reason.
Our take: History doesn't say "reverse engineering is bad." It says the way it's done and what you do with the result decide everything. The problem with AI tools is that they remove the friction that used to make people think twice.
Why REA changes the risk, not just the speed
Here's the R&D point we think most coverage misses.
In the past, deep binary analysis needed rare skills and years of practice. That skill barrier quietly acted as a filter: most people who had it also understood the ethics and the law.
With REA, the filter is gone. A few facts from REA's own project page show how serious it is:
- Nearly 3,900 commits and 39 releases: it's mature, not a toy.
- It can analyse AI model files, which means your trained models, not just your apps, are now in scope.
- It can run completely locally, so there's no central service to monitor or block misuse.
- It covers desktop, mobile and web targets.
Our honest view: The tool is neutral. But neutral tools in more hands mean more mistakes and more bad actors, simply by numbers.
The real costs for a company
- Shrinking lead time. A feature that once took a rival 6–12 months to copy might now take weeks.
- Exposed secrets in the app. We've seen apps (in audits) with API keys, internal URLs and pricing logic sitting inside the build. An AI agent finds these fast.
- Model theft. If your edge is a fine-tuned AI model shipped on-device, it's now a target.
- Legal grey zones. Most laws were written before AI agents existed. Who's responsible when an agent crosses a line: the user, the tool maker or the model provider? No court has settled it yet.
What smart companies should do now
We don't think fighting the tool is the answer. History shows that never works for long. Instead:
- Run REA on your own product first. See what an outsider can learn in an hour. Fix that before anyone else finds it.
- Move secrets to the server. Nothing sensitive should live in the app itself.
- Use obfuscation and anti-tamper for truly sensitive code and on-device models.
- Update your terms of use to clearly cover reverse engineering and AI agents (with advice from a lawyer, since this varies by country).
- Compete on speed and service, not only on hidden code. Compaq's clones didn't kill IBM's brand overnight; slowness did.
Protect what you've built, with Devaigo
At Devaigo, we help companies see their products the way an attacker or competitor would, then close the gaps: security reviews, app hardening, safe AI adoption and custom AI systems.
Want to know what someone could learn about your app today?
📧 info@devaigo.com
📞 +91 9625208088
Book a free first conversation. We'll show you where you're exposed and what's worth fixing first.
Note: This article is for general information and is not legal advice. Laws differ by country; please consult a lawyer for your situation.
