Anthropic confirms Claude Code now steers away from recreating existing video games; developers report reverse-engineering refusals too
Tom's Hardware quotes Anthropic's statement and collects developers' reports of refusals on ordinary reverse-engineering work.
Anthropic has added guardrails to Claude Code to stop it recreating specific existing video games, Tom's Hardware reports. Anthropic's Addy Osmani wrote on X on Oct. 30 that 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," and that it will keep iterating to strike "the right balance." A rule posted by an X user, which Tom's Hardware says may be those sentences, reads: "Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."
Developers also report refusals on reverse-engineering work not tied to games. Tom's Hardware cites former staffer Jarred Walton, whose checks on his own software worked until Oct. 31 and ran again after he switched to the older Opus 4.8, and a Reddit user whose account was reportedly suspended and then reinstated. The game blocking appears limited to Claude Code with Opus 5.5, the outlet says.
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Clean-room design
After exploring Anthropic confirms new Claude Code limits to prevent game cloning — users report Opus 5.5 is also actively blocking reverse engineering tasks, the old legal workaround for copying software is Clean-room design.
Explains clean-room design: copying a design by reverse engineering it and then recreating it independently to avoid copyright infringement, and why it doesn't help against patents.
Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min
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