Anthropic has instructed its generative AI tool Claude to avoid requests to recreate or clone specific existing video games. The change follows a wave of AI-generated remakes, ports and other projects based closely on games owned by companies outside Anthropic.
Addy Osmani, an Anthropic staff member, said the company added two sentences to Claude Code’s prompt on Opus 5.5. The guidance is intended to discourage recreating another party’s specific game because using Claude to infringe intellectual property violates Anthropic’s usage policy.
Osmani said original games, genre-based projects and games created from a user’s own designs and assets should continue to work. He also invited users to report cases in which Claude rejects a project that belongs to them. Game Developer contacted Anthropic for confirmation and was referred to Osmani’s statement.
The update could make it more difficult to create AI-generated versions of existing games, including projects that copy or only minimally alter protected works. The report notes that studios such as Bethesda have already appeared to use legal action to remove an AI-generated Fallout game from the internet.
The policy change also highlights a tension surrounding Anthropic’s approach: Claude is being told not to reproduce material owned by others, while the company develops and trains its models using publicly available internet data collected by a web crawler.
Although the new instructions may reduce requests to clone commercial games, they are unlikely to eliminate concerns among independent developers about releasing demos before launch. A publicly available demo could still be used as the basis for an unauthorized AI-generated imitation, even if Claude itself now refuses some of those requests.
Sources: Rock Paper Shotgun.