Anthropic's Claude Code Now Refuses to Copy Existing Video Games

Anthropic has told its AI coding tool, Claude Code, to say no when someone asks it to rebuild an existing video game as-is. Renaming the game or calling it original does not change the answer.

What changed

Anthropic technical staff member Addy Osmani confirmed the change on X on October 30 local time. He said two sentences were added to the prompt, the standing instructions that guide Claude Opus 5.5 inside Claude Code. The reason is intellectual property. Using Claude to infringe it violates the company's usage policy.

• Allowed: games built from your own design.
• Allowed: games in the same genre as an existing one.
• Declined: copies of an existing game, even if renamed.

The move follows a rise in AI game cloning. Some indie developers canceled public demo releases or made public playtests private over cloning worries. Valve has acknowledged AI slop and cloning on Steam, but says it does not want to act as a gatekeeper on which tools developers use.

What is not clear

Users have reported rejected work mid-development on Claude Code's GitHub page, where developers log problems. Some say even general reverse engineering, which means taking something apart to see how it works, is blocked. It is unconfirmed whether the update is the cause. Claude cannot verify whether a user owns a game, and locally run models do not carry the same limits. Osmani said Anthropic will keep refining its guidelines and asked developers to reach out if their work was wrongly declined.