Anthropic admits it: Claude is banned from cloning your favorite games

Yesterday we reported that Claude Code had quietly started refusing to recreate existing games. Back then Anthropic said nothing. Now it has: a company spokesperson pointed reporters to a post by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff.

"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 wrote. Original games, genre games and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working, he said. Anthropic plans to keep tuning the rule, and if Claude turns down something that is yours, Osmani asks people to send it his way.

The reply landed on the evening of October 30, right under the post by the user chasm, who first spotted the rule. It is pushed from Anthropic's servers under a flag called tengu_heron_brook, has been arriving since around October 27 and cannot be switched off. By then chasm's post had passed 1.7 million views.

The motive is easy to see. Indie developers have spent the past few weeks worrying about AI clones that ship before the original game does. One studio even cancelled a public playtest so nobody could feed its demo to an AI, and Valve had to explain to developers this week how it plans to keep such copies off Steam.

The open questions are still open. Nobody knows how the agent will tell a pirate clone from a licensed port: a studio that turns board wargames into digital versions on commission from the rights holders already says its work has stalled. And anyone set on cloning without asking can simply switch to open-weight models that have no such limits at all.

Bottom line: the ban is now official. Honest developers are left waiting for the promised fine-tuning, the dishonest ones will just change models.