The flip side is that this might become a thing of the past for future hardware/firmware, if AI hardening becomes standard practice.

There’s no substitute for having open systems that aren’t cryptographically locked down by the manufacturer.

We were already there. For most people, we are still there. For most devices (especially popular ones, with enough manufacturing volume) there's just enough hardening, downgrade prevention, encrypted or signed firmware blobs, on top of already rare reverse engineering skills and patience, to make it infeasible for most people to give it a crack. Using an LLM for that also isn't a mainstream idea either (plus you're unlikely to have a Claude subscription if you're not a software developer in the first place).

Open systems are great and all in the idea, but the facts are that for profit companies do the research and produce most of the things.