People are asking Claude to hack their smart TVs. The ads are the target

Gathin T. went to visit his parents and found their TV covered in ads. So he did what developers now do with any annoyance that runs on Linux: he pointed an AI agent at it.

"Vibe coded my parents' TV this afternoon!" he wrote on X. Then he put the whole thing on GitHub as a project called cleanyourtv. According to TechCrunch, a few thousand people ran his prompt on their own sets over the next two days. When we checked, the repository had more than 10,000 stars.

He has company. TechCrunch rounded up a small wave of people using coding agents, mostly Anthropic's Claude Code, to strip the junk out of the TVs they already paid for. It is a strange new kind of jailbreak. You don't need to know how Android works. You need to know how to ask.

"Can you hack this?"

The viral version is the laziest one. Ryan Doyle sent Claude Code the product listing for his TV and asked, "Can you hack this?" He says the agent walked him through removing the ads and preinstalled apps, speeding up the interface and setting up a custom screensaver, and he posted a video to prove it.

Mihir Gupta spent an afternoon on his. With Claude Code doing the work, he disabled 25 bloatware apps and swapped the 192 MB stock launcher for an 83 MB custom one with rotating wallpapers.

Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala built a project called dumbtv, which he says he made with a mix of DeepSeek and Claude models. Its GitHub page puts the pitch plainly: "Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else." He told TechCrunch he got sick of ads and of not being able to get straight to what he wanted to watch. dumbtv has been tested on a Fire TV Edition set and on Android and Google TV sets from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Nvidia's Shield.

Under the hood, none of this is new. Android-based TVs have a developer mode and a debugging bridge, ADB, that has let tinkerers disable apps for years. What's new is that you no longer have to learn ADB. The agent connects over Wi-Fi, reads the list of installed packages, works out which ones are ads and tracking and which ones keep the TV alive, and switches off the bad ones. The hard part was always knowing which is which on a specific model. That is exactly what a language model is good at faking confidence about, which brings us to the failures.

It is your TV, until it isn't

Not every attempt went smoothly. TechCrunch reports that some users found Claude wouldn't respond to a bare "hack my TV" request and needed a more detailed prompt. One person said they bricked an Android TV. Another got stuck halfway through a Fire TV. All of these projects are works in progress.

The better ones are built with that in mind. The cleanyourtv README says it disables packages and never deletes them: "Nothing is uninstalled, so a restore script can undo every step." Before touching anything it records each app's state and the default home screen, and it refuses to turn off the stock launcher until a replacement is installed and working. That last rule exists because the fastest way to brick a TV is to kill its Home button with nothing to take over. The README lists tested setups for about 123 models across 42 brands. Samsung and LG sets, which run their own operating systems, are out of scope.

The README also flags a risk people will skip. Network ADB is unencrypted, so a TV left in debugging mode is an open door on your home network. It tells users to turn debugging off afterward and revoke the authorizations. Asking an AI agent to hack your TV and then leaving the TV hackable by anyone on the Wi-Fi would be a very 2026 way to lose an argument.

Why do the TV makers care? Because the ads are only half the business. Smart TVs use automatic content recognition, or ACR, which identifies what is on your screen through screenshots, audio clips or digital fingerprinting. As TechCrunch notes, the ad industry makes money selling that viewing data or using it to target ads. Switch off the tracking services and that revenue stream gets thinner, one living room at a time.

TechCrunch's article didn't include any response from TV manufacturers. They will have noticed anyway. The next firmware update is the obvious place for a reply, and a company that wants its ad slots back can lock down developer mode as easily as it ships a new screensaver.

For now, a few thousand living rooms have quieter screens. Getting there used to take a forum thread, a USB cable and a free weekend. Now it takes one sentence typed into a terminal.

Sources: TechCrunch, cleanyourtv on GitHub.