Krentsel: Exo autonomously modified its code to inspect Pokémon game RAM
Alex Krentsel · Exo: Harnesses should see their own code and logs — Alex Krentsel, UC Berekeley / Google Research · Aug 15, 2026 · at 11:41
Alex Krentsel, creator of Exo, explains how his recursive AI harness can inspect runtime memory and modify its own integration code during a task.
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“We've had XO running, playing, playing Pokemon. And while it's running, the system itself decided to try inspecting the like RAM of the game and then went and mapped the RAM to, and people have reversed in the past, people have reverse engineered this manually. They figured out what components in the memory map to different things In the game. So there's like, in the memory, there are certain places where you store the positions in the world, the Pokemon that's currently active. Are you in a battle or not? Literally Booleans in, in the code, in the memory. And the agent was able to modify, EXO was able to modify its own integration with the game and feed this into the system message to better inform its decision-making as it progresses.”
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