Anthropic has changed its Claude Code tool so that it won’t recreate specific existing video games, following growing concern from developers about their games being cloned.
The change was spotted around October 27 by X user Chasm before Anthropic said anything publicly. The new rule tells Claude: “Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.”
Anthropic has since confirmed the change, with Addy Osmani, a member of technical staff, explaining in a post on X that the rule was added because using Claude to infringe on IP breaks the company’s usage policy.
“We added two sentences to Claude Code’s prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy,” he wrote.
“Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working.”
Developers have been worried about clones
The change comes as more developers worry about their work being copied before it even launches. Alliance Arts recently cancelled the public demo for its upcoming Steam game Drunken Goddess Reflux, warning that its content “could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI.”
Other developers have been pressing Valve on how it plans to stop clones from flooding Steam.
How well the new rule works remains to be seen, as Claude has no way of checking whether a user actually owns the game they’re working on, and other models that can be run locally don’t have the same restrictions.
Osmani said Anthropic will “continue to iterate to ensure we’re striking the right balance,” and asked anyone who has their own project turned down by mistake to contact him.
