As vibe-coded game recompilations and PC ports take over the scene, Claude AI developer Anthropic has added a new rule to its code to stop users from "recreating someone else's specific game" in an attempt to prevent IP infringement when using the technology that rips from others' work.
Revealed in a post on Twitter by Anthropic member of technical staff Addy Osmani, while "original games" based on users' own ideas can still be AI-generated, recreations of existing ones should no longer be permitted.
"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," Osmani explains. "Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working."
The new rule itself, highlighted on Twitter by user chasm, reads: "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."
Obviously, it remains to be seen whether this'll work as intended or if folks will find a way around the restriction. Osmani notes that Anthropic is trying to strike "the right balance," and for now, "if Claude turns down something that's yours, send it my way."
In theory, though, this should put a stop to Claude being used for vibe-coded recompilations, PC ports, and the like. Last month, for example, a Bloodborne PC port with multiplayer and keyboard-and-mouse support went viral, but its credits revealed that Claude was used in almost every aspect of the project. We've also seen AI-infested Mario Kart Wii, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and Banjo-Tooie projects, just to name a few. At this point, it feels more like a rarity for the developers behind these sorts of things to declare they didn't use AI.
Hopefully, it might also reduce the number of AI-slop clones of games released on Steam. The original creator of Needle in a Haystack Simulator jokingly apologized as their game became such a hit that it spurred on numerous copycats flooding the platform, and theirs isn't the only game to see blatant recreations like this.
However, it's clearly not intended to stop people from vibe coding their own games, so I doubt we're suddenly going to see the amount of AI usage on platforms like Steam take a nosedive.
