Anthropic cracks down on game cloning in Claude Code after wave of AI-built knockoffs
Anthropic cracks down on game cloning in Claude Code after wave of AI-built knockoffs
Anthropic prevents its coding assistant Claude Code from replicating existing video games, employee Addy Osmani confirms the addition of two new lines in the Opus 5.5 system prompts prohibiting cloning others' games, this action violates the usage policy.
Same story4 other outlets also reported this
- ITHome · AI··First
Anthropic limits the recreation of games with the Opus 5.5 model in Claude Code
- QbitAI··+30 h 44 min
Claude Code urgently called off dark modifications to Harness that prohibit reverse gaming
Adds:effect limited as cannot stop other models
- Ars Technica · AI··+2 d
Anthropic introduces Claude Code new rules to restrict game cloning, but it is difficult to stop the AI game replication wave
- The Verge · AI··+3 d
Anthropic updated Claude Code's system prompts to prevent AI from replicating specific games
- The Decoder··+3 d·Reading now
Anthropic bans game cloning in Claude Code to combat the wave of AI replicas
In order of publication · later reports are added as they appear · Compared by AI from each outlet’s title and summary
Anthropic is blocking its coding assistant Claude Code from recreating existing video games. Employee Addy Osmani confirmed on X that two sentences in Claude Code's system prompt for Opus 5.5 now prevent the tool from cloning other people's games. Using Claude to infringe on intellectual property violates the usage policy, Osmani said.
The rule has been active for several days and kicks in even when a clone gets renamed or passed off as an original work. Users can still build their own games, genre titles, and projects with custom assets, though some report running into problems with original projects too.
The change follows a flood of AI-powered cloning projects. Users have been tapping Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra to crank out hundreds of unofficial browser ports of well-known titles like Halo and GTA Vice City. Tools like Reverse Engineer Anything help by pairing AI agents with reverse engineering to turn native binaries into readable pseudocode. One developer grabbed headlines by recreating parts of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps. Sony's PlayStation 5 also became a target after a jailbreak led to a quick wave of emulators.
After images and videos, the intellectual property battle is now spilling into software. Osmani said Anthropic plans to keep tweaking the rules going forward.
AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans
Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.
Source: The Decoder · the-decoder.com