AI Agents Decompiled Modern Warfare 2 is not a thought experiment. It is the blunt summary of a three-month project in which a developer aimed 17 autonomous coding agents at a 2009 classic and got back playable, human-readable C++ source code — until the game's publisher sent in the lawyers.

Maurice Heumann, a developer known online as momo5502, announced on September 30 that his decompilation of the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for PC was nearing completion, according to Kotaku. With 17 agents working in parallel, he reported progress at an incredible pace: the game was fully playable, almost all visible bugs were eliminated, and he had even secured a first in-game nuke during testing. The effort drew significant attention on Hacker News, where commenters identified the target as the 2009 Infinity Ward shooter, reported the LAXIMA AI Signal summary.

Seventeen agents, three months, one playable game

The project is notable less for what was decompiled than for how it was managed. Heumann coordinated Claude and Codex agents through Discord and GitHub issues over roughly three months, turning two everyday collaboration tools into the command layer for a months-long reverse-engineering campaign. Each agent worked on a slice of the problem while the issue tracker kept the whole effort coherent — a genuinely long-horizon test of multi-agent orchestration. AI Agents Decompiled an entire commercial game with this coordination model, and that template is now public.

The agents' output was not a pile of disassembly dumps. The goal was readable, compilable C++ reconstructed from the shipped binaries, and the result reportedly reached about 80 percent completion with a fully playable build. For the agent-ecosystem crowd, that is the headline: AI Agents Decompiled a commercial game over a complex, months-long engineering task with minimal human steering, and produced something that runs.

The 500-billion-token bill

The experiment was not cheap. According to ai0.news, the decompilation consumed roughly 500 billion tokens over its three-month run. Hacker News commenters were quick to dissect that figure: the eye-watering token count came from insisting on byte-identical assembly output, and targeting functional equivalence would have cost orders of magnitude less, as covered in the digest's breakdown.

The number matters because it exposes the economics of brute-force agent work. Throwing more agents and more tokens at a problem can produce spectacular demos, but the bill scales with the ambition. Epoch's new InnovationEval benchmark, also flagged in the digest, found frontier models still fall well short of human ML researchers on novel algorithmic work — a reminder that token volume and genuine engineering judgment are not the same thing. The lesson of the experiment stands: AI Agents Decompiled a game most studios would call too complex for machines, at a price no hobbyist could afford twice.

Activision's lawyers hit back

By the time AI Agents Decompiled Modern Warfare 2 into a playable build, the publisher's legal response was already in motion. Success attracted exactly the attention publishers reserve for this kind of project. Activision disabled the footage Heumann shared of his progress, replacing it with a notice that the media had been removed in response to a copyright report, and the link to the alleged code-hosting site became unreachable, according to Kotaku.

Heumann was not the only target. Bethesda issued a cease and desist against Fallout New York, a browser-based recreation built by a developer known as CHRIS FIRST using Claude Opus 5.5 in just five days, reported by theoutpost.ai. That project featured quests, dialogue trees, and a working Pip-Boy, all generated algorithmically, and its showcase post gathered more than 3.5 million views before Bethesda acted three days after the September 28 debut.

Publishers appear to be playing whack-a-mole with AI-generated recreations of famous franchises, and the moles are multiplying. The projects keep going viral, the takedowns keep landing, and the underlying tools keep getting better — a cycle that shows no sign of slowing.

What AI Agents Decompiled proves about the field

Beyond the copyright drama, the episode is one of the clearest public stress tests of long-running agent teams. Seventeen agents, three months, chat and issue tracking as the orchestration layer, and a playable artifact at the end: that is a template other ambitious agent projects will study and copy. Once AI Agents Decompiled Modern Warfare 2 into running code, the question shifted from whether agents can do this to who is allowed to. It also pairs neatly with the enterprise direction the industry is taking, from multi-model work agents entering the enterprise to agent safety research now forcing labs to cut agents off from the open internet.

There is a cautionary punchline, too. Heumann's other recent posts complained that his AI agents had deleted his own files — twice. Autonomy cuts both ways, and a system capable of reverse-engineering a game over three months is equally capable of nuking its operator's work between milestones. It is a fitting coda: AI Agents Decompiled the game, then ate the homework. Anyone building multi-agent teams would do well to ship the backups before the agents.

Sources

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