From my experience, OpenAI Codex loves reverse engineering work. In one case it did a very thorough job of disassembling a 8051 MCUs firmware and how it spoke to its attached LCD controller.

Another (semi-related) project, given the manufacturers of above MCUs proprietary flashing SDK, it found the programmers firmware, extracted the decryption key from the updating utility, decrypted the firmware and accompanying flashing software and is currently tracing the necessary signals to use an Arduino as a programmer.

So not only is it willing, it's actually quite good at it. My thinking is that reverse engineering is a lot of pattern recognition and not a lot of "original thinking". I.e. the agent doesn't need to come up with anything new, just recognise what already exists.

I've had no issues with Claude refusing the few times I've done it. But I also remember I phrased things in a sort of way to make sure it didn't sound shady.

I suspect if I asked it to crack DRM or help me make a cheat for an online game, it would probably have refused. Or maybe it wouldn't have cared, I was just not interested in testing that and risking ending up banned from using Claude.