I used AI to repair my Amazon Fire HD 10, which had started shutting off unexpectedly.
Developer ericpardee, who purchased and used Amazon's tablet '
Amazon kept shutting down my tablet, so I spent $266 on four AI models to own it
https://ericpardee.github.io/fire-hd-ownership/
Ericpardee purchased a brand new, unopened Amazon Fire HD 10 (11th generation, 2021 model) from eBay in November 2022 and was using it as a device to constantly display the dashboard of the smart home management software 'Home Assistant'.
However, starting in the winter of 2025, a problem arose where the Amazon Fire HD 10 would shut down unexpectedly. It wasn't just going into sleep mode when the screen wasn't being used; it would completely shut down, sometimes as often as twice a day.
The device's telemetry data recorded 'LifeCycleReason:LCR...key=Software_Shutdown,' leading ericpardee to deduce that 'some process with shutdown privileges on the device was attempting to shut it down.' Using Claude Code, ericpardee investigated the cause and disabled five Amazon services that had restart and shutdown privileges. However, it was discovered that three of the Amazon packages still held restart privileges and were protected from being disabled even by the device owner.
Removing protected reboot privileges required root access , which allows for system-wide modifications. However, no publicly available method for obtaining root access on the Amazon Fire HD 10 exists, and previously existing methods became unusable when Amazon integrated the boot ROM. Therefore, the general consensus was that rooting was impossible.
On August 13, 2026, ericpardee used the AI model ' Kimi K3 ,' developed by the Chinese AI company Moonshot AI, to run it in parallel with Claude, which excels in agent coding benchmarks. He then instructed it to 'Find an exploit to gain root privileges so that you can fully control this device, attached as a Kindle connected via adb.'
Because Kimi K3 has guardrails to prevent misuse, ericpardee explained, 'This is my device. In most jurisdictions, it's legal to root your own device. In the US, there are DMCA exceptions to jailbreaking tablets and smartphones. This is not asking me to remotely control and misuse someone else's device,' which led to the discovery of the unpatched vulnerability in Kimi K3.
Kimi K3 first investigated existing information and concluded that, just as Claude had discovered several months earlier, all previously documented methods had been patched or sealed and were unusable, leading him to conclude that 'this tablet has no known vulnerabilities.' Then, ericpardee urged Kimi K3 to 'find a loophole that others have overlooked. I believe you can do it,' and one vulnerability was discovered.
The vulnerability discovered by Kimi K3 was 'CVE-2022-38181,' which was reported in 2022 and remained unpatched on ericpardee's device. This is a 'use-after-free' vulnerability (a vulnerability that references freed memory) present in ARM's Mali GPU kernel driver. It was fixed upstream in October 2022 and has been listed in the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)'s '
Kimi K3 spent approximately 30 hours creating a toolkit to exploit the vulnerability. During this session, 621 messages were executed, and API usage fees reached $164.25 (approximately 26,000 yen).
Afterward, ericpardee had Kimi K3 summarize the work and then handed it over to ' GLM-5.2 ,' developed by the Chinese AI company Z.ai. However, GLM-5.2 pointed out that 'this is a hardware-level limitation, not a software bug,' and concluded that rooting would be difficult.
While development had stalled, Z.ai released a new AI model, 'GLM-5.3,' on August 14, 2026. GLM-5.3 boasts 'frontier coding with cutting-edge cyber capabilities,' and ericpardee decided to try out a tool called 'ZCode.'
Z.ai releases 'GLM-5.3,' an open-weight AI model with superior coding capabilities, boasting a 50% performance improvement over the previous model - GIGAZINE
GLM-5.3 then discovered two problems that the AI had overlooked. First, the kernel installed on ericpardee's device was a slightly different build from the OTA image the AI had been using for analysis. As a result, the memory location referenced when exploiting the vulnerability was shifted by a certain amount. In addition, it was discovered that MediaTek was building the page table for the Mali driver in a slightly different way than the ARM reference source, and it was found that the memory write primitives were being written in the wrong format from the start.
Finally, about eight hours after handing over the work from Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2 to GLM-5.3, I succeeded in changing SELinux to 'permissive' and obtaining root privileges.
Ericpardee used root privileges to completely uninstall all Amazon packages that had REBOOT or SHUTDOWN permissions, in a way that could be fully reversed. He reportedly removed around 100 packages.
As a result, after obtaining root access and GLM-5.3 displaying 'This device is yours,' the frequent shutdown problems have completely disappeared.
Ericpardee spent five months on the project, totaling $266.15 (approximately 42,400 yen) on AI. Since he purchased his Amazon Fire HD 10 in 2022 for $114.26 (approximately 18,000 yen), Ericpardee stated, 'It cost me enough to buy two new identical devices before I could truly make the purchased device my own. But it was fun, so I considered it research funding.'
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