A $10K Bounty Aims to Make Sony’s PlayStation 5 a Computer Again

Using your PlayStation to play games is just fine. But what if you could use your Sony console to vibe code with your AI agents on Linux instead? That's what the ownership advocacy organization Fulu wants to make possible, and it’s willing to pay $10,000 to prove it can be done.

Helmed by YouTuber Louis Rossmann and fellow consumer advocate Kevin O'Reilly, Fulu pays bounties to the first person who proves they can fix or bypass product features that Fulu deems to be hostile to device owners. Fulu puts up the first $10,000, then will match donations up to another $10K. Since it started in late 2025, Fulu has paid out two bounties so far—one for a fix of Google’s outdated Nest thermostats and another for DRM-enabled Molekule air purifiers.

On Tuesday, Fulu announced a bounty that would reward hackers who could disable Sony’s proprietary software locks on its PlayStation 5 consoles and, in theory, allow a user to install an operating system like Linux on the gaming console.

“Make PlayStations computers again,” O'Reilly tells WIRED. “Let's go back to general-purpose computing and understand that if we own the hardware, we should be able to put the software we want onto it.”

In early July, Sony announced it was ending production of physical discs for all new games on its PS5 consoles. The move was controversial, inspiring consternation from gamers and advocacy groups, many of whom tend to like physical media and have qualms about PlayStation’s terms of service, which specifically state that buying a digital copy of a game does not mean you own it.

“A lot of PlayStation owners are concerned about what's going to happen to their consoles,” O'Reilly says. “They fear that they can get rug-pulled at any moment.”

The ongoing RAM shortage has raised costs across all sorts of goods, including consumer tech like Sony’s consoles. As prices go up, Fulu wants to show that the way to weather that expensive storm is to find a new way to rely on devices you already own.

“Gaming consoles have significant amounts of computing power,” O'Reilly says. “Why can't I repurpose that? If I'm trying to vibe code or set up agentic AI systems, why can't I use this box, this computer that I bought—that I own—to do what I want to do?”

Like all of Fulu’s targets, there is a risk attached. Breaking through a company’s software restrictions may run afoul of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, legislation passed in 1998 that prohibits users from bypassing digital locks on software services. It’s a law that is punishable by fines and even jail time.

To win a Fulu bounty, a person has to prove they have a fix, but they are not required to release it to the public if they are worried about potentially facing legal consequences. That means even if the PS5 jailbreak is accomplished, it may not be available for people to use widely. Fulu says the idea is less about actually making this relatively niche use case for the PS5 possible, and more about encouraging people to look differently at what control they have over their devices.

“Our ownership rights are under attack constantly,” O'Reilly says. “It's time that we had the conversation and we came back to the idea that computers are computers and we should be able to use them how we want to.”