We added two sentences to the Claude Code message in Opus 5.5 to avoid recreating someone else’s specific game because using Claude to infringe intellectual property is against our usage policy.
Original games, genre games, and games created from your own designs and assets are meant to keep going.
We will continue to iterate to ensure we strike the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude rejects something that’s yours, send it to me.
– Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) October 30, 2026
A massive wave
Anthropic’s new message comes as AI coding tools are fueling a flood of game projects based on existing work in one form or another. This includes collected copies of game demos that make some developers afraid to publicly show their early work, as well as thousands of AI-powered retro game decompilation and porting projects. Thanks to AI tools, what used to be a process that required a lot of time and painstaking human effort is now much more efficient (although some veteran coders complain that these decomposition projects and vibration-coded ports fail to meet the same level of quality as human-centered efforts).
The trend has gotten so bad that decomp.dev, a long-running community dedicated to the “brutally difficult and time-consuming task” of decompiling games, announced it was shutting down last month. Community manager Luke Street wrote that the rapid improvement of AI tools had made it clear that “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” as newcomers “rac.[e] to port games, especially using decompilations to which they did not contribute.”
“Decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompiling: watching progress increase was a fun way to stay motivated when every fraction of a percent required real human effort,” Street wrote. “Today, that same idea has transformed decompilation into a game of empty numbers, exacerbated by people who just want to burn chips to make the numbers increase or ‘port the game to the PC’, and to hell with everything else.
How to try to stop the tides
While Anthropic’s new message can be seen as a noble effort to counter the onslaught of AI-powered vibration-encoded copies, it seems unlikely to have much impact overall. This is mainly because enthusiastic game copiers can simply switch to any of the other frontier models that have not introduced such restrictions. And even if the AI industry as a whole started banning these types of use cases, coders could switch to cheaper open models that are not subject to these types of restrictions and are not so far behind in capabilities.
