Anthropic's Claude now refuses to reverse-engineer video games — and legitimate developers are caught in the net
Anthropic takes steps to block Claude from reverse-engineering video games
Claude has quietly begun blocking modding, decompiling, and reverse-engineering of game code, with no official explanation from Anthropic. The move follows a wave of AI-assisted chaos: Mario dropped into Elden Ring, World of Warcraft and Vice City running in browsers, and a PS5 jailbreak that put Halo 2 and Breath of the Wild on Sony's console. Critics note the restrictions are so broad they block basic troubleshooting, and that the copyright concern is ironic coming from companies that trained on the world's art.
This sudden concern for copyright highlights the irony of frontier AI companies that copied the world's information and art for their training sets and are now concerned with copyright infringement.
- TrevorFSmith
If they didn't want us to use other people's ideas without permission then why did they use other people's ideas without permission to make the ideal tool for using other people's ideas with permission?
- throwa356262
These guys are no fun at all.
Is this really the same cowboys that recklessly broke into others networks and instead of apologising proudly told the world how they did it?
Every 6 months Anthropic publishes a report telling us how closer they have gotten us to extinction as if human life was just a game, yet now they draw the line at computer game modding??
- genldd
Is this.. The right approach? Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't? I don't have a solution to offer, but I bristle at the idea of one indistry deciding which other industries suffer the negative externalities of their product, while others they decide are spared.
- mirashii
They really didn’t though. They put it in a client side modification to the system prompt. You can just rip it out with a proxy or a small local modification to your client, which Claude will be happy to do for you. They took a token step so that people would write these headlines in the hope it would stave off more negative attention in the video game world without actually doing anything meaningful.
- newprint
Game REs & crackers are probably the most persistent personality types you can find in software world. They are also one of the most technically sophisticated software engineers around. I expect we will see a new AI system pop-up soon, made by RE, specifically trained to RE games/software, thanks to this ban. Pandora box is open.