alt Hacker NewsI do find using AI in a clean-room reverse-engineering project amounts to shooting yourself in the foot: you're sleep-walking into a legal minefield in an already legally gray field, and also risk over-relying on the AI's trial-and-error instead of developing a solid intuition of its functioning yourself.
At the same time, if we're being honest, Synaptics will have sent the C&D no matter what. They are an anti-consumer company with more lawyers than engineers, so of course they'll use all their resources to bully any competition, especially the most vulnerable.
Clean-room reverse engineering involves two teams: one with access to the thing being reverse engineered, who write documentation of it, and the one in the clean room who do the implementation based only on the documentation. There's no reason you could not use AI for the first part, as the documentation is then evidence that you are only looking at behaviour and not source code.
Using it inside the clean room is more of an issue.