Security researchers broke into brand-new iPhones within days, and AI tools are helping. Here is what that means for anyone who owns a phone.
Jailbreaking, the practice of removing the limits a phone maker puts on your device, is having a moment again. How-To Geek reports that a security team called Calif jailbroke the new iPhone Duo on its launch day. It also showed a jailbreak that survives on the iPhone 18 with Lockdown Mode turned on.
Calif is described as a white hat team, meaning hackers who look for weak spots to improve security. None of its jailbreaks have been released to the public. Videos of the iPhone Duo with tumbling home screen icons have been circulating, though.
Public tools are also gaining ground. Dopamine 3.0 has picked up a lot of traction in 2026, according to the report, and it has been good at keeping up with new versions of iOS. Jailbreaking never fully went away, but it is getting louder.
Jailbreaks depend on finding exploits, which are flaws that let someone get around a phone's protections. The article says large language models, the AI behind chatbots, are good at that work. They cut the time spent on tedious testing and can write and check code far faster than a person.
Cloud AI tools usually have guardrails meant to block this kind of activity. But the article notes there are known ways around them, and that local models, which run on your own hardware, are less restricted. It still takes skilled people to pull this off.
A related sign of demand is Motorola building official support for GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused version of Android. It is not a jailbreak, but it comes from the same frustration with the standard phone experience and its trackers.
Meanwhile, the article says Google is making it harder to sideload apps on Android, which means installing apps from outside the official store. Upcoming Fire TV devices will not support sideloading at all. Apple, the author notes, has long tried to control what people can do on iOS.
How-To Geek ties the trend to people tiring of tighter restrictions and privacy concerns. The report does not say how far public jailbreaks will spread or how Apple and Google will respond.
Jailbreaks are getting faster to build, but they carry real security risks, and privacy-focused options like GrapheneOS offer a safer route.
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