Anthropic Adds a Claude Code Rule Against Recreating Existing Games
The restriction targets copies of specific games while leaving original projects and genre-based designs allowed.
Anthropic has instructed Claude Code’s Opus 5.5 not to recreate a specific existing game, even if a user renames the copy or calls it original. The prompt change still allows original games, genre-based projects, and work built from a user’s own designs and assets.
Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, confirmed the change on X. He said the added prompt instructions are intended to stop Claude from assisting with intellectual property infringement. Anthropic will keep adjusting the policy, and Osmani invited users to flag cases where Claude refuses work based on their own designs.
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.
Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to…
— Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) October 30, 2026
Anthropic added two sentences to the prompt. They steer Claude Code away from recreating a particular game, but they are guidance for the assistant, not a guarantee that every request to copy a game will be blocked.
The change addresses an ongoing concern among developers as AI-assisted games and demos draw complaints about copying. The most recent Steam Next Fest showcased twice as many demos as the previous event, with AI-assisted games accounting for most of the increase. Some studios have canceled public demos over concerns that playable builds could be reverse-engineered into copies.
One Bluesky post documents a creator finding a similarly named game in Steam search alongside their own title, after months of work on the original.
How do you even survive as an indie in the current landscape? This is insane.
— Sos "Buy Lazy Kickers" Sosowski (@sosowski.bsky.social) 2026-10-17T06:28:33.284Z
Anthropic’s rule sets a limit for its own coding assistant, not for games published on Steam. At Steam’s Indie Connect event, Valve’s Tom Giardino said the company did not want to decide which tools developers could use, but offered no specific remedy for the cloning problem. The two responses leave separate questions: what an AI assistant should help produce, and how a storefront should handle games that imitate existing work.
Where would you draw the line between a game built around familiar genre ideas and a recreation of a specific title? Follow the discussion about AI tools and game copying through X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.
