Anthropic adds rule to stop Claude Code recreating existing games

Anthropic has updated its AI coding tool Claude Code to prevent it from replicating existing video games. This change was first observed on October 27 by X user Chasm and confirmed by Anthropic member of technical staff Addy Osmani on X. The new rule instructs Claude Code to create original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets, but explicitly forbids recreating specific existing games, even with a different name.

Users cannot disable this restriction. Osmani explained that Anthropic added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer the model away from reproducing another person's intellectual property, as using Claude to infringe IP is against their usage policy. Original games, genre games, and user-created games built from assets should continue functioning as intended.

However, it remains uncertain how effective this rule will be, as safety restrictions on AI models can potentially be circumvented with cleverly worded prompts. Moreover, there is no straightforward method for Claude Code to confirm whether a user actually possesses the game design or assets they are working with. This update comes amid growing concerns among developers about the misuse of AI tools to clone games.

Recently, Digital Sun postponed a public playtest of ReVamp due to concerns that its demo might be fed into an AI tool, while Valve has been pressured to outline measures to prevent AI-generated game clones from overshadowing original games on Steam.