jailbreak
Americannoun
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jailbreaks
plural
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an escape from prison, especially by forcible means.
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Digital Technology.
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an instance of gaining access to the operating system of a smartphone, tablet, etc., especially one manufactured by Apple.
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a software program or piece of hardware used to accomplish this.
You'll need a jailbreak to run unauthorized apps.
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an instance of circumventing restrictions on access to any computer system or digital content.
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verb (used with object)
verb (used without object)
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of jailbreak
Explanation
A jailbreak is a prison escape. Whenever someone who's incarcerated or locked up manages to get out illegally, that's a jailbreak. Prison security, from armed guards to razor wire, locks, and security cameras, means that jailbreaks don't happen often. These days it's more common to use this word to talk about computers or smartphones. When a hacker performs a jailbreak on one of these devices, she bypasses the manufacturer's restrictions so that even unauthorized software can be installed.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
"However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people."
From BBC ● Jul. 1, 2026
The vulnerabilities don’t represent a full so-called jailbreak, a point of view shared by some security researchers familiar with Amazon’s research.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 14, 2026
David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said that Anthropic refused to fix a jailbreak of the guardails in its Fable model.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 14, 2026
"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company said.
From Barron's ● Jun. 13, 2026
Whenever we get a jailbreak, Paul, aka Thing Three, streaks around the gym with both arms up yelling “Blue Team! It’s what’s for breakfast!”
From "Liar & Spy" by Rebecca Stead
We have only one path forward: build a more capable American open-weight alternative that withstands attempted jailbreaks.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 26, 2026
It’s whether, at the checkout aisle in Walmart, there’s a hang rack with a little 99-cent device that jailbreaks your iPhone and installs another app store.
From Slate ● Oct. 13, 2025
The interior minister said this was partly responsible for the frequent jailbreaks.
From BBC ● Jan. 18, 2022
We're now paying $2,000,000 for remote iOS jailbreaks, $1,000,000 for WhatsApp/iMessage/SMS/MMS RCEs, and $500,000 for Chrome RCEs.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 8, 2019
He was also known, perhaps most famously, for his jailbreaks and escapes.
From New York Times ● Nov. 11, 2018
"The cyber defence capabilities will enable enterprises and governments to defend themselves against threat actors that are jailbreaking closed models to perform cyberattacks," Mistral's Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample said in the statement.
From Barron's ● Oct. 6, 2026
It arose during a process called "jailbreaking", where researchers use a series of complex instructions to see if AI tools ignore guardrails - which Mindgard said should have stopped Kimi from discussing concerning topics.
From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2026
Anthropic said it thinks the government became aware of a method of so-called jailbreaking before Friday’s action.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 13, 2026
Prison officials could fight the jailbreaking problem at its root by expanding access to permitted communications—for example, offering free messaging or some restricted access to social media.
From Slate ● Dec. 14, 2023
Some people use jailbreaking for sketchy purposes, yet others deploy it to elicit more creative answers.
From Scientific American ● May 11, 2023
In response, some users who were trying to find ways to mask this data from the app rooted or jailbroke their phones to fake GPS sensor data—which actually put them at even greater risk.
From Slate ● Feb. 28, 2018
This time, Brown jailbroke Stapel’s memoir by translating it into English and posting the document on a public website.
From Science Magazine ● Feb. 14, 2018
The firm said it was also confident a jailbroken Kimi 2.6 could allow hackers to run code on its computing resources and connect to the internet - making it a potential launchpad for cyber-attacks.
From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2026
A model can’t be jailbroken into revealing dangerous knowledge if its weights haven’t encoded that knowledge.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 26, 2026
But the jailbroken tablets are essentially expensive paperweights without a Wi-Fi mobile hot spot to connect to the internet.
From Slate ● Dec. 14, 2023
Hackers have jailbroken the PS4 with a new kernel exploit, according to Wololo.net, a website that covers jailbreaking news, seemingly opening the door for people to run things like homebrew apps on Sony’s last-gen consoles.
From The Verge ● Dec. 14, 2021
This is especially true if your phone is jailbroken.
From Fox News ● Aug. 7, 2021
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
