Anthropic quietly bans Claude Code from recreating existing games
Anthropic Cracking Down on Video Game Rewrites
Around October 27, Claude Code began enforcing a new rule pushed from Anthropic's servers under the flag "tengu_heron_brook," with no setting to disable it. It tells the model to build original games or games from the user's own designs, but never a recreation of a specific existing game, even if renamed or called original. The change raises questions about the future of game rewrites and modding.
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.
- mgdev
Can you imagine a devtools company deciding, "Actually, no, we're going to police what kind of programs you can compile" ?
They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology. We cannot afford to blend the two, or we're going to end up as some kind of perverted global theocracy.
- drunner
Anthropic (and others) mass harvested source code from around the internet while ignoring licenses to build their product. That's of course allowed (by them).
Using the trained model to create certain types of software that they already harvested, not allowed?
What's the difference between having the model make a game and writing any other software? It's like trying to say you can only use our model to write new stories but not fanfiction when they trained the model on the original works which would allow the fanfiction to be produced in the first place.
- drivebyhooting
Mark my words: AI will only be allowed to destroy the software engineering profession, but somehow protectionism will be enforced for everything else in the name of “safety” and “fairness”.
- DavCreator
https://xxcancel.com/chasmmmmmmmmmmm/status/2116062991686721...
- m4rtink
So we are going from running your stuff from cloud that randomly closes accounts or charges ridiculous costs to pinpointing arbitrary AI use cases and banning them on a whim. I guess that's progress !?
Indeed, cloud == other peoples computers, with all what it entails.
- rcr-anti
Some context to this, there's been a bunch of discussion in indie game development spaces about how it might be risky to release demos, or any information really, since a bunch of (probably? can't necessarily assume now.) people seem to immediately try to clone it with agents. It's to the extent I've seen genuine confusion about which game is the original in Twitch streams/chats. There have been a bunch of takes one way or another on it, including 'if your game is clone-able from a demo your idea isn't unique or complex enough'.
Ars's bit on it recently:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/ai-game-clones-are-ma...
- philipkglass
The most important secret of the atomic bomb was that it could be built at all. That's the same way I feel about Anthropic's products (increasingly, tech demos rather than products, if you go off the happy path.) They've demonstrated what is possible. Now I'm hoping for a fistful of rivals to build functional equivalents.
I'm still an Anthropic customer but in the long run I'm going to be using services that align with my interests. I want a provider that won't nerf or refuse requests around software security, building LLM training pipelines, the natural sciences, and reverse engineering. Anthropic is useful as a transitional bootloader for developing and demonstrating LLM technology broadly but each new safety "enhancement" makes it look more dispensable.
- umvi
Easy to see the slippery slope from "safety" to "DRM". Abliterated/open models will become increasingly important for AI freedom if they aren't made illegal first...