Anthropic Tells Claude to Stop Tinkering With Content It Doesn’t Own, Aiming to Curb Wave of GenAI Game Clones

It will still allow users to create “original” games with the technology

Anthropic has instructed its generative AI tool Claude to begin declining requests from users to recreate or clone existing games, following a wave of people using the technology to produce six-fingered remakes. Rather than risking infringement of the intellectual property belonging to series or titles owned by companies other than Anthropic, Claude will now limit itself to generating only “original” games cobbled together from whatever data it draws upon.

“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 employee Addy Osmani wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a random user with a cat profile picture who had noticed 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 Dezvoltator reached out to Anthropic for confirmation and was directed to Osmani’s post.

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

There’s a serious degree of irony to Anthropic slapping Claude on the wrist and telling it stealing is bad. One of the ways the company develops and trains its generative AI models is by scraping publicly available data from the internet via a web crawler.

So, some pilfering of material is bad, with little bot people continually asking to regurgitate stuff into slop they can then try to pass off as something they’ve created. But not all pilfering of material, lest our entire business rest on rather shaky ground.

It’s unlikely this move from Anthropic does much to convince actual developers of original games that they’re safe to release demos of their games prior to launch, 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.