CLIP and OWLv2 running locally break reCAPTCHA at a 92.6% per-session rate, free.

arXiv 2609.18518 replaces the paid cloud VLM that prior CAPTCHA work assumed with open-source models on local hardware. Zero-shot untrained solvers reach 58% per-challenge on independent-tile challenges with CLIP and 43.5% on grid-split images with OWLv2; end to end, 92.6% of 500 real reCAPTCHA sessions solved with no API access and no per-attempt cost. The economic friction that kept the defense viable is gone.