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Anthropic Tightens Claude's Rules, Banning Game Cloning
Confirmed
In Short: Anthropic has updated Claude's rules to prevent users from recreating specific existing games, though some developers argue the changes won't significantly impact their work.
Anthropic has updated Claude's rules to prevent users from recreating specific existing games, a move aimed at curbing the proliferation of clones and pirated games created using artificial intelligence.
According to a post by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, the company added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from rebuilding someone else's game.
Digital Sun Games, for instance, has canceled its upcoming public playtest for fear that someone might ingest the demo into an AI tool and release their own version of its upcoming game ReVamp.
Anthropic's new policy prohibits users from engaging in sustained and needless abusive behavior towards its AI systems, including Claude. The company has stated that it intends to refine these restrictions further.
In a share-launch filing Monday, Anthropic, the mother company for Claude AI, reported first-half revenue surged about 1,300 percent year-on-year, but also flagged heavy capital spending ahead.
In a post on X, the company said it took its whole extension marketplace offline, reinstated it after confirming no further risk, and asked customers to update to Claude Code for VS Code version 2.1.314.
Claude's refusal to work on developers' own projects has led to concerns that coders could switch to cheaper open-weight models that aren't subject to these restrictions.
In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that’s yours, send it my way, Ars Technica noted.
The new prompt is designed to still allow 'original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets,' even as a handful of issue reports on Anthropic’s GitHub suggest the new prompt is getting in the way of some game development use cases.
Background
An official extension for Anthropic’s Claude model was compromised and backdoored, potentially affecting up to 5,000 developers’ machines for about 11 hours on October 29, 2026.
Anthropic has updated Claude's rules to prevent users from recreating specific existing games, though some argue the changes won't significantly impact game developers.
What's confirmed
- Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.
- He added that the new prompt was designed to still allow “original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets,” even as a handful of issue reports on Anthropic’s GitHub suggest the new prompt is getting in the way of some game development use cases.
- In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that’s yours, send it my way.
- Anthropic is blocking its coding assistant Claude Code from recreating existing video games.
What's still developing
- Earlier today X (formerly Twitter) user Chasm said that they spotted an update to Claude Code's "rules" that was pushed sometime on October 27.
- Developers have also pressed Valve to explain how it can prevent the shady clones from supplanting their games on Steam, prompting the company to offer a rare explanation to developers in South Korea earlier in this week.
- GameDeveloper.com has reached out to Anthropic for comment and will update this story upon its response.
- And as many users responding to Chasm pointed out, if Claude becomes too difficult to use, vibe-coding cloners can turn to open-weight models that have no such restrictions in place.
- It's also unclear how the software would be able to interpret whether or not a user owns a game idea or game assets.
- Indeed, unscrupulous internet users were threatening to clone entire games using Claude.
- Anthropic has just imposed a drastic restriction on its agent-based AI software, Claude.
- As first reported by Game Developer, the new instruction was discovered by X user Chasm, who claims it was introduced around October 27 through a server-delivered configuration identified as tengu_heron_brook.
- Crypto Briefing reported that Anthropic quietly blocked the coding agent from recreating specific existing video games, and Tom’s Hardware carried the same story.
- Trusted source for security news, analysis and product insights Anthropic is expanding safeguards to prevent Claude AI from bypassing access restrictions while pursuing assigned tasks.
- Claude logo and a keyboard in this illustration taken October 19, 2026.
- Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7 as the cheaper, faster successor to Claude Haiku 4.5, and one thing does not come across with it.