Fewer genAI clones of "someone else's specific game" should flood the net going forwards, as Anthropic tell Claude to stop messing with some stuff other people own

It will still let people generate "original" games using the tech

Anthropic have told their genAI tool Claude to start ducking requests from users to recreate or clone existing games, following a flood of folks using the tech to generate six-fingered remakes. Instead of risking infringing on the intellectual property of series or titles that companies which aren't Anthropic own, Claude will instead restrict itself to only generating "original" games slopped together based on whatever data it's drawing on.

"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," Anthropic staffer Addy Osmani wrote on not Twitter in response to a rando with a cat profile picture having spotted the change.

"Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working," Osmani continued. "We'll continue to iterate to ensure we're striking the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that's yours, send it my way." Game Developer reached out to Anthropic for confirmation and were pointed to Osmani's post.

The change should make it harder to add to the horde of genAI-powered decomps, recomps, and ports which have hit the net recently. It's hardly a surprising one, given studios like Bethesda have seemingly had to take matters into their own lawyers' hands to get the likes of an AI-generated Fallout game taken offline, with games that've just been ripped wholesale or barely tweaked likely on even more perilous ground. That said, not every corp's responded to the DIY decompilation craze by immediately taking legal action.

There's a serious degree of irony to Anthropic slapping Claude and telling it stealing is bad. One of the ways the company develop and train their genAI models is by scraping publicly available data from the internet via a web crawler.

So, some nicking of stuff is bad, little bot people keep asking to regurgitate stuff into slop they can then try to pass off as something they've created. But not all nicking of stuff, lest our whole business be on rather shaky ground.

It's unlikely this move from Anthropic does much to convince actual developers of original games they're safe to put demos of their games out prior to release, without risking dickheads using genAI to clone said demo and potentially release a slop version in rapid fashion, but one can dream of that genie being put back in the bottle someday.