As AI’s ability to write games gets stronger, more and more people are directly asking AI to recreate their favorite games, but this no longer works in Claude Code. Many Claude Code users have recently found that whenever they ask it to make a clone of an existing game, Claude flatly refuses, and there is no setting to turn this off. Anthropic has confirmed this, saying it did add new rules to the prompts for Claude Code with Opus 5.5. What’s more troublesome, some developers report that even normal reverse-engineering work such as inspecting their own software is now being blocked.
Anthropic confirms new restrictions in Claude Code: copying existing games is prohibited, and developers report that even reverse engineering is blocked.
At the end of October, netizen X Chasm had previously posted that Claude Code received a new rule pushed from Anthropic’s servers around October 27, which users cannot disable on their end. The rule in the screenshot roughly means:
可以做原創遊戲、某個類型的遊戲，以及用使用者自己的設計和素材做出來的遊戲
不要做某款現有遊戲的翻版，就算改了名字、或宣稱是原創也一樣
Image source:Chasm
For example, asking Claude to make a racing game is fine, but specifying that it should be “like Need for Speed” may trigger restrictions.
Subsequently, Anthropic technical staff member Addy Osmani also responded below to confirm that the team added two sentences to the Claude Code prompts for Opus 5.5 to make it avoid recreating specific games belonging to others, on the grounds that using Claude to infringe intellectual property already violates the usage policy. He also emphasized that original games, games in a genre, and games made with your own assets should still be possible as usual, and if Claude refuses something that is your own, you can bring it directly to his attention:
It’s no surprise that this rule was added: after Opus 5.5 launched, many people started using it to dissect and port existing games. Digital Sun, the developer of Moonlighter, even canceled public testing for its new title over fears that once the demo was released, it would be fed into AI for replication.
However, this new rule is likely not just about game replication. According to Tom’s Hardware The report mentioned that its former editor Jarred Walton used Claude Code to review software he was developing. It had been working normally all along, but on October 31 it started being refused. After switching the model back to Opus 4.8, he was able to continue working. Walton speculated that Anthropic may have also added a rule specifically targeting reverse engineering.
Nor is this the only case: someone used Claude Code to ask Opus 5.5 to reverse engineer a product’s activation mechanism, and their account was suspended for a time before being restored:
Vibe coder on Reddit loses Anthropic account while reverse engineering software Its over for Claude https://t.co/4orNYLdki9
— raghav (@raghavbuilds_) November 1, 2026
Note that Anthropic only confirmed the rules for copying the game; there is still no official explanation regarding reverse engineering being blocked.
From the perspective of software and game developers, this restriction is good news—at least AI will no longer help people copy works with one click. But Game Developer also points out that it is actually very difficult for the system to determine whether users really own the game idea or assets, and such rules will probably only stop the laziest plagiarists; anyone who really wants to copy can simply switch to an unrestricted open-source model.
Source: KOCPC Chinese