Google and the AI cloning wave: why Alphabet owns the rails
As seen on the 24/7 Wall St. homepage on October 8, 2026.
Nice larp. These are cute but enterprises don't pay for the software, they pay for support. It's like everything running on RHEL. It doesn't do anything special, it just has a strong organization behind it that we know will exist in 10 years. Same with Office and Adobe products. For games. Sure little indie single players. But let's see some GitHub monkey maintain the servers for their fortnite clone.
If AI reverse-engineering commoditizes app software, value shifts to whoever owns distribution and cloud runtime, the bull case this thread is stress-testing before Alphabet's November 4 earnings. The top reply, upvoted more than the post itself, says the moat was never the code.
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A tool called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, is spreading fast on GitHub. It gives AI agents the ability to inspect apps, binaries, APKs, and games without access to source code, letting people recreate and redistribute software at a pace that user b0men, posting to r/wallstreetbets on October 8, compared to the early Napster moment for music.
The post, which pulled 501 upvotes, argues that if app-level software moats weaken, the value shifts to whoever controls distribution, cloud runtime, and identity. The bull case for Alphabet rests on Search, Chrome, Android, Gemini, Google Cloud, and the Play Store sitting underneath everything regardless of what gets cloned on top.
The top reply, from Money_Potential7780, scored higher than the post itself at 553 upvotes and cuts the other way: enterprises never paid for the code itself, they paid for the support organization behind it, citing RHEL, Office, and Adobe. The server-maintenance problem for any cloned multiplayer game was offered as the sharpest stress test of the thesis.
The post author is careful to say this is not a prediction that all software goes to zero, and notes they had not yet bought the stock when writing. Alphabet's earnings on November 4 are the near-term event the thread is circling, with the question being whether commoditized app software reads as a tailwind or a distraction for a company whose revenue is still rooted in advertising and cloud services.
Several replies note that anyone cloning commercial software at scale faces significant litigation risk. That friction could slow the wave the post is describing, which is part of why the thread has not settled on a verdict and why the top comment landed harder than the original argument.
Mentioned: GOOGL