Piracy 3.0: How AI Made Copying Software Easy in October 2026
In the first 2 weeks of October 2026, copying software stopped needing a specialist.
I am writing this down now because I think we will look back on these 2 weeks. My feed has felt like the late nineties again. Only this time the thing being shared is the software itself.
What I saw
A solo developer called Brandon Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 to build ArtCraft, a free set of 7 apps that copy Adobe's line up. There is a Photoshop, an Illustrator, a Lightroom and a Premiere, all written from scratch and given away under open licences (Tom's Hardware via Yahoo, Creative Bloq). His reason was Adobe's cancellation fees.
The apps are early and rough (Vice). He says no Adobe code was used. That will be tested by people paid a lot more than me.
In the same week an open source tool called REA went from under 10,000 GitHub stars to over 100,000 in 6 days (KDnuggets). It lets coding agents like Claude Code look inside software they did not write.
On 6 October someone put GTA V in a browser tab. It was a download of around 700 MB against roughly 170 GB for the PC game. Take-Two had it offline within hours (Startup Fortune).
Then there is skate. A fan project called ReSkate now runs EA's game offline and has been downloaded 350,000 times. Its developers say AI tools cut years off the reverse engineering (PC Gamer).
Around all of that, my feed filled with the stranger side of remix culture.
Call of Duty soldiers doing kickflips down grind rails between sniper shots. Action heroes from the eighties and nineties dropped into famous viral clips. Guides on getting past the IP filters in AI video tools, the way people used to jailbreak an iPhone.
Why it feels familiar
I have seen this film before. Napster, LimeWire, torrents. The music industry spent a decade suing its own customers before streaming fixed the price.
The mood is the same too. It is anti establishment, a bit Hackers, a bit Lawnmower Man. Rebels with laptops taking on the big software companies.
The difference is speed. Napster needed someone to rip the CD. Now it takes a coding agent and someone patient enough to follow a YouTube video.
Where the fun stops
Full Circle, the studio behind skate, responded to ReSkate by saying skateboarding is built on community and creative expression. That is the right public line. I suspect the conversations inside EA, Adobe and Take-Two sound different.
People have modded games they bought for decades. Handing out free copies of what a team spent years making is where it changes. Once it reaches developers' wages, or an actor's face, the lawyers arrive.
I think we are in for a ride. Expect takedowns and test cases over the next 12 months.
The part that matters for business
Strip out the piracy and something more important is left. Anyone can now build the small paid app they used to rent.
I see it in my own work. I run Porter Wills on an operating system I built with AI.
If there is a tool I pay for monthly that does one job, I can build my own version. I am watching people with zero coding experience ship working iOS apps by following instructions, making the creative calls and pressing publish.
Brandon Thomas did not build ArtCraft for fun. He built it because a cancellation fee annoyed him enough. That is a pricing problem dressed up as a technology story.
What I take from it
A lot of software has been priced as if it were hard to build. That protection is going fast.
Services are next. AI has already changed what one marketing operator can deliver.
What still holds is what a stranger with an AI model cannot copy in a month. The customer relationship, the data, the service and the trust behind the brand.
If you sell software, a subscription or creative work, ask yourself one question this week. What would your customers still pay you for if a free copy appeared tomorrow?
