Anthropic clamps down on Claude’s AI video game clones

Judgment

Developers of decompilations, recompilations and ports now decide whether to fund the rebuild work themselves: Claude Code on Opus 5.5 will no longer recreate a specific existing game, so the cheap AI assist that made retro clones feasible is withdrawn, and only original, genre, or own-asset games keep the help.

Basis

Anthropic's Addy Osmani, replying on X, said the company "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 did not confirm the exact wording a user had posted — "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is named or called original" — only that two sentences were added. The mechanism is prompt-level steering inside Claude Code's system prompt, not a separate classifier or filter, so the boundary is drawn in natural language the model interprets. Osmani said original games, genre games, and games built from the user's own designs and assets "are meant to keep working," and invited developers whose own work gets refused to send it to him. The Verge says it asked Anthropic whether other Claude system prompts will be updated too.