The creator of the world’s first 3D-printed gun claims he’s developed a way to thwart government-mandated software meant to block 3D printers from making firearms. It’s an opening volley in what’s shaping up to be an evolving battle between regulators trying to stem the tide of ghost guns and individuals trying to create workarounds.
Cody Wilson, who claims to have made the detection-defying tool, is calling it “Hochulization” as a direct jab at New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who pushed through the nation’s first law mandating gun file detection software on new printers earlier this year. “New York is trying to reach into the internet and police how open-source 3D printing is done,” Wilson, who’s based out of Austin, Texas, told The Verge. “I think of it as a self-defense measure.”
The tool is designed to break a relatively simple approach to a 3D-printed gun ban. Wilson’s company, Defense Distributed, runs DEFCAD, the world’s largest 3D gun file repository, which he says hosts over 200,000 files of gun designs and components, such as suppressors. Each of those files can be identified by a hash, a unique string of numbers that’s created by running the file through an algorithm. In theory, a gun file detection system that uses a hashing-based identification method would look for those exact hashes to determine whether a file is a potential gun, flag it, and prevent it from printing.
Hochulization mucks up that process by automatically changing those hashes. It adds a series of bytes to each file that changes the hash without altering the function of the end product. A 3D-printed suppressor or gun, in other words, would still work as intended. “Hochulizaiton is a de minimis policy to change the hash of every file that gets created and downloaded to where there is never going to be a complete library of hashes,” Wilson says.
Wilson says he wants to apply the Hochulization treatment to all files hosted on DEFCAD by default as a means of “self-defense” against growing calls for gun detection software, which he describes as invasive digital surveillance. Wilson says he will make the tool available to DEFCAD users, though he says he also intends to make it open source, which would let an individual user with a gun file apply the tool to scramble the hash and potentially sidestep detection.
“I think all the files in the repository, the 3D files anyway, should be Hochulized,” he adds. “And so that is what we’ll do.” He claims he has begun this process.
Wilson’s approach is an early indicator of the resistance to 3D-print-blocking tech. In this case, the momentum is coming from a Second Amendment advocate, but that might not always be the case. Groups of makers, digital rights experts, and members of the entertainment industry who aren’t focused on guns have all spoken out against the tech, expressing fears that requiring file scanning on printers introduces a new level of digital surveillance into the process that could limit what everyone can create.
3D-printed firearms are growing in number but remain an evolving public threat. In 2021, the New York Police Department confiscated just one 3D-printed gun. That jumped to 109 in 2024. Prominent gun policy group Everytown found similar upticks across 20 other cities. Still, when compared with the percentage of conventional firearms confiscated around the country, 3D-printed models remain comparatively small. The total number of firearms in the US has been estimated to outnumber people.
But 3D-printed gun technology has also come a long way since Wilson first printed his single-shot “Liberator” in 2013. Today, models like the FGC-9 can fire multiple high-velocity rounds without breaking and have been found in the hands of neo-Nazi cells in Europe and rebel groups fighting Myanmar’s military junta. 3D-printed gun components, like switches that can turn a single-fire conventional firearm into a machine gun or suppressors that make shots easier to conceal, are arguably even more dangerous. These tools are typically illegal or require special licenses to acquire. 3D printing offers a workaround. Luigi Mangione, who admitted to shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and is awaiting sentencing, allegedly used a partially 3D-printed Glock-style pistol frame and a 3D-printed suppressor.
Policymakers and gun control advocates argue cases like this demonstrate a glaring gap in the legal system. People with prior felony convictions and others who aren’t legally allowed to own guns can do so anyway with the help of a 3D printer. And while many states regulate the making and selling of so-called “ghost guns,” actually enforcing those laws is notoriously difficult. This new approach, which requires 3D printers to install mandatory file-blocking software, attempts to close that gap by stopping a print before it ever starts. Industry experts are still debating whether that’s technically feasible at scale. Gov. Hochul, who pushed through the country’s first law mandating print-blocking software on new printers as part of the state’s FY 2027 budget, says it’s necessary to close what she calls a black-market “plastic pipeline.”
Hochul’s office did not respond to our request for comment regarding Wilson’s Hochulization workaround.
New York isn’t alone. A similar bill in California, AB 2047, is gaining momentum and is advancing to the Senate floor for a vote. Like in New York, this bill would require new printers manufactured or sold in the state to be equipped with print-blocking software. The state Department of Justice would publish a roster of compliant printer models, and those not on the list would be banned from sale or transfer in the state starting in December 2029.
A spokesperson for California Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who introduced and coauthored AB 2047, declined to comment when asked about Wilson’s project.
Neither of these efforts explicitly details what print-blocking software should look like. That’s being left up to groups of industry experts with backgrounds in manufacturing technology, artificial intelligence, firearms regulation, and other relevant fields. A purely hash-matching approach would limit the number of non-guns mistakenly identified as guns, but as Wilson’s project shows, it may be trivially easy to bypass. More expansive approaches that use AI to analyze a file’s geometry and predict whether it’s a gun would almost certainly prevent more guns from being printed, but they also risk introducing more false positives.
Wilson’s hoping his tool will make its way into those working group conversations. By showing just how simple it is to complicate a purely hashing-based approach, he’s essentially trying to force policymakers’ hands into choosing between a more aggressive scanning scheme or the status quo of nothing.
“You are going to have to do more than create a database of known files and check against hashes because that’s too easy to defeat,” Wilson says.
Dartmouth College associate professor of engineering Solomon Diamond told The Verge Hochulization would likely work on a technical level to bypass a hash-based detection model. Still, he said that doesn’t necessarily make the approach useless as a policy path. In reality, it’s not clear that every 3D printer user would go the extra step to change a hash. Downloading gun files from DEFCAD also requires setting up an account and linking an email address, which is another barrier to entry. The hashing approach, in other words, is better than nothing and might stop the casual, less motivated user from downloading a gun.
Moving beyond hash matching, Wilson says his team found other ways to bypass more sophisticated detection using “adversarial noise.” To do this, his team first created their own AI detection model designed to classify guns and gun parts, trained partly on both public and non-public files from DEFCAD’s database. They based their model on claims made by other companies, such as the Spain-based Print&Go, which is working with lawmakers in New York and California.
Wilson claims he was able to get files past their own system using techniques like re-saving the same gun part as a slightly different mesh (a digital representation of the object’s surface) or adding “a small extra lump of unused geometry.” Overall, Wilson says their gun detection system, even when trained on high-quality data, still had a 30 percent false positive rate. He says that false positives speak to issues inherent to more prediction-based systems.
Wilson approaches the scanning debate as a self-described crypto-anarchist and an aggressive Second Amendment advocate. He’s a leading voice in arguing that gun files should be considered constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. He also created the platform Hatreon as an alternative to Patreon to thwart its speech policies, a platform that attracted extremists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis until it was shut down in 2018.
But concerns over this proposed change to the way 3D printing works aren’t limited to gun owners. Makers and hobbyists previously told The Verge they fear this new paradigm will falsely label non-guns, like this e-reader case, as dangerous weapons and limit their freedom of expression in the process. Others are concerned a process that earnestly starts with gun file increments could be expanded by corporations looking to enforce IP and copyright protections.
Wilson isn’t new when it comes to picking fights over 3D-printed gun laws. After posting the first Liberator files online, the State Department ordered him to remove them and threatened him with jail time for allegedly violating ITAR export-control rules. Wilson and Defense Distributed sued the agency, claiming they attempted to stop him from publishing computer code, which he says is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. That set in motion a complex web of legal fights over the broad claim that the gun file codes aren’t constitutionally protected speech, an issue that’s still being debated in courts.
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