First Untethered Jailbreak Since 2019: How Close Researchers Already Are to Apple's iPhone 18 Pro

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents First Untethered Jailbreak Since 2019: How Close Researchers Already Are to Apple's iPhone 18 Pro.

Live on stage at the Hexacon conference in Paris, the security research team Calif.io demonstrated a jailbreak that targets Apple's upcoming iPhone 18 Pro family and iOS 27.0.1. The organizers had promoted the demonstration itself as a "brand-new iPhone jailbreak" — and the team delivered, as heise.de reports.

What makes the demo special: it is the first untethered jailbreak publicly shown since iOS 9 in 2019. "Untethered" specifically means that the modification survives every device restart, without you having to reconnect the iPhone to a computer or manually execute the exploit. Exactly this property was missing from all solutions in recent years — they were usually semi-tethered and reset after a reboot, making them impractical for everyday use.

How Calif.io Found the Vulnerability

The specific vulnerabilities the team exploits are not public. What is clear is that AI played a central role in finding the exploit chain. With AI support, the researchers compared the current beta version of iOS 27.2 with iOS 27.0.1, identifying the security fixes Apple has implemented since the demo version. They do not reveal exactly which AI models were used.

This method is not exclusive: in theory, other attackers with the right prompts could build similar attack tools. However, the particularly powerful AI models required for this are currently only accessible to select companies and security researchers.

Calif.io Has Already Cracked Apple's Hardening Before

Calif.io is no newcomer in Apple security research. As early as May 2026, the team showed how the Anthropic model Mythos Preview could be used to write a macOS kernel exploit in just a few days that bypasses the protections of Apple's M5 chip. In August 2026, they likewise used AI for an attack via screen sharing. The Paris demo fits into this series — with the difference that this time an untethered jailbreak on an iPhone was shown.

What This Means for Apple and for You

Apple has not commented on the demonstration so far. The company will likely close the vulnerabilities in the foreseeable future via a corresponding update — that would be the natural response path. According to Winfuture, there is no indication that the vulnerabilities are already being actively exploited. As long as no exploit is in circulation and no update is available, there is no urgent need for action on your part.

What the demo nonetheless shifts: it puts the next iPhone generation in the spotlight long before it officially hits stores. This gives Apple a window to plug the exploited vulnerabilities before the 18 Pro models go on sale. That such vulnerabilities surface is, however, no reason for the security community to sound the all-clear: commercial spyware providers routinely purchase such access capabilities and resell them to governments and authorities.

Source: t3n.de