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Over the past week a dramatic claim has been travelling across social media: artificial intelligence has “decompiled” Adobe’s software, rebuilt Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator, and given them away for free. Some versions go further and throw in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for good measure.
There is a real story underneath. But the claim, as it is being told, is wrong in the one detail that matters.
What actually happened
The project behind the noise is called ArtCraft. Developer Brandon Thomas has released a set of free, open-source desktop apps written in Rust, a modern programming language, for Mac, Windows and Linux. They are designed to feel familiar to people who use Adobe’s tools: an image editor, a vector editor, a video editor, a photo library and more. According to Decrypt, Thomas built them with the help of Anthropic’s Claude, and he has said he started after Adobe charged him its cancellation fee one too many times.
The project’s own page lists 13 apps and says they are “rebuilt in pure Rust” from scratch. It does not mention Adobe at all, and it does not claim to have decompiled anything.
It is also honest about where things stand. The image editor, PhotoCraft, is labeled “early alpha”. Most of the others, including the word processor, the spreadsheet and the presentation app, are “in development”. Decrypt quotes a pixel artist who called the Photoshop-like editor “completely unusable” for now, and reports that Thomas, who first promised to match Adobe’s features within a month, now says it will take months.
Decompiling and rebuilding are not the same thing
This is where the viral version goes off the rails.
Decompiling means taking a finished program, the machine code your computer actually runs, and turning it back into something close to the source code its authors wrote. If you decompile Photoshop, you are working from Adobe’s own code.
What ArtCraft describes is closer to a clean-room rebuild: you study what a program does, how its tools behave and what its menus offer, and then you write your own program from scratch that behaves in a similar way. Think of tasting a dish in a restaurant and cooking your own version at home, as opposed to walking out with the chef’s recipe book.
Decrypt says ArtCraft was built from public documentation and observed behavior. That is not a technicality, and it is not new: in the 1980s Compaq cloned the basic firmware of the IBM PC this way, and the clone-PC industry was born. Copying how something behaves is a very different matter, legally and technically, from copying its code.
Where the “decompiled” story came from
Part of the confusion is understandable, because a second project made headlines in the same days. REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, is a free toolkit that lets AI coding assistants drive professional reverse-engineering software such as Ghidra, a tool the US National Security Agency released to the public in 2019. Decrypt reports that REA went from under 10,000 stars on GitHub on October 6 to more than 100,000 by October 12.
REA’s own page says it is meant for lawful research, education, interoperability and the analysis of software you own or are authorized to examine. And according to Decrypt, ArtCraft is not built with REA at all.
So two separate stories, one about a reverse-engineering toolkit and one about a set of open-source apps, were glued into a single headline that neither of them supports.
To be fair, AI really is making reverse engineering easier. A fan used AI and a recompilation toolkit to bring Fable 2, an Xbox game, to Windows, and Decrypt reports that Activision had footage of an AI-decompiled Call of Duty taken down. That is a genuine shift, and worth watching. “AI decompiled Adobe, and Photoshop is now free” is not it.
A word about the people spreading it
The pattern is familiar by now. A story breaks in English. Someone reads the headline, skips the article, and within hours there is a vertical video with a shocked face announcing the end of Adobe, and of Microsoft Office too, why not. No link to the source. No mention of “alpha”. No idea of the difference between decompiling a program and rebuilding one.
Most of these self-appointed tech gurus are not lying on purpose. They are in a hurry, and on social media being first pays better than being right. The cost lands on their audience: people who cancel a subscription, download the wrong thing, or simply walk away believing something false about how software works.
The fix takes thirty seconds: open the link and read past the headline. If a video does not tell you where its claim comes from, that is your answer.
What it means if you use Adobe, or run a business
Don’t uninstall anything. The ArtCraft apps are free and worth a look if you are curious, but by their own label they are early software, not a replacement for tools you rely on for paid work.
The bigger story is the one the viral videos missed. AI is making it cheap to copy what a program does, even without its code. That puts pressure on companies that charge a lot for software people mostly use for its familiar buttons, and pushes their real advantage towards what is harder to copy: file compatibility, integrations, support and years of polish. In March, Adobe agreed to pay $150 million to settle a US Justice Department case over hidden early-termination fees, while denying wrongdoing. We found no public statement from the company about ArtCraft. Its customers, meanwhile, are about to get more alternatives. Real ones, slowly, not the ones in the videos.
This article is also available in Italian on Breaking Lab.
