Anthropic has added two sentences to the Claude Code prompt for Opus 5.5 to discourage users from recreating certain games made by other developers. Adi Osmani, who announced the change on October 30, 2026, said the restriction is intended to prevent intellectual-property abuse while allowing original games, genre-based projects, and games built from unique designs and assets to continue working.
Because using Claude to compromise IP is against our usage policy, we added two sentences to the Claude code prompt in Opus 5.5 to prevent you from recreating certain games of others.
Original games, genre games, and games built from unique designs and assets are designed to continue working.
We will continue to iterate to see if we have the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude turns down yours, please send it to me.
— Adi Osmani (@addyosmani) October 30, 2026
A wave of AI-assisted game projects
Anthropic’s update comes as AI coding tools fuel a growing number of game projects based in some way on existing work. The trend includes copies of game demos, with some developers reportedly reluctant to show early projects publicly. AI tools have also made retro-game decompilation and porting far more efficient, turning processes that once required painstaking human effort into projects that can be completed much more quickly.
A list of AI-powered decompilation and porting projects catalogs thousands of efforts involving retro games. However, some veteran programmers have criticized AI-assisted “vibe-coded” ports and decompilations for failing to match the quality of projects created through a human-centered approach. Examples of those concerns appear in discussions about quality standards and non-vibe-coded game projects.
Decompilation community feels the pressure
The trend has also affected decomp.dev, a community focused on the “extremely difficult and time-consuming task” of decompiling games. The several-year-old project announced that it would close last month.
Community maintainer Luke Street said the rapid improvement of AI tools had shown that “the community aspect of decompilation is broken.” According to Street, new entrants were increasingly “racking up” game ports, particularly by using decompilations to which they had not contributed.
“Decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompilation, and when every percentage requires real human effort, watching your progress was a fun way to stay motivated,” Street wrote. “Today, that same thinking has distorted decompilation into an empty numbers game, made worse by people who just want to burn tokens to inflate the numbers or ‘port the game to PC’ and condemn everything else.”
Restrictions may have limited effect
Anthropic’s prompt changes may represent an effort to counter the flood of AI-generated copies, but they are unlikely to stop the practice by themselves. Developers who want to replicate existing games can move to other frontier models that do not impose the same restrictions. If the wider AI industry adopts similar policies, programmers could also turn to cheaper open-weight models that lack those limitations and are not far behind in functionality.
Source: arstechnica.com