Anthropic Blocks Claude Code From Cloning Existing Video Games

The Decoder said the restriction has been active for several days and applies even when a cloned game is renamed or presented as original work. Users can still build their own games, including titles in established genres and projects that use their own assets. Some users, however, report that the block has also caught original projects.

The change follows a surge in AI-assisted cloning. According to the report, people have used Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to produce hundreds of unofficial browser versions of well-known games such as Halo and GTA Vice City. Tools such as Reverse Engineer Anything pair AI agents with reverse engineering to turn compiled programs into readable pseudocode. One developer drew attention for recreating parts of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps, and a jailbreak of Sony's PlayStation 5 was quickly followed by a wave of emulators.

Osmani said Anthropic plans to keep adjusting the rules.

The change moves the intellectual property fight over generative AI, which has so far centred on text, images and video, into software. Coding agents can now rebuild complex commercial products quickly, and the step shows that at least one model provider is willing to restrict what its tool will build, not only what it will say.

The approach has limits. The rule is an instruction in Claude Code's system prompt, so it covers only Anthropic's tool, and the reports of original projects being blocked show how hard it is to separate building in a genre from copying a specific product. For game publishers and software companies, the main thing to watch is whether other AI coding tools adopt similar restrictions.