AINov 3, 2026, 10:19 AM UTC·2 min read

Claude Code Now Blocks Game Cloning and Some Reverse Engineering

Anthropic has changed Claude Code's prompt in Opus 5.5 to stop it recreating other people's games, but users say reverse engineering of their own code is affected too.

A developer's screen showing an AI coding assistant with a blocked request next to a retro video game. — Image: Hipertextual

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Anthropic has changed how Claude Code behaves to discourage piracy. Late last week, users noticed that the AI programming tool no longer clones existing games or performs certain reverse-engineering tasks, after an update pushed from the company's servers.

The company confirmed the change. Addy Osmani, an Anthropic employee, said two sentences were added to the Claude Code prompt in Opus 5.5 to discourage it from recreating someone else's specific game, because using Claude to infringe intellectual property violates the usage policy. According to Osmani, original games, genre games and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working.

Only Opus 5.5 is affected

The restriction appears to apply to Opus 5.5 and not to earlier versions of the model. That may be because older models produce less convincing results than the newest and most capable one.

The decision has already drawn criticism. Many replies to Osmani's post point out that the games in question do not belong to Anthropic, so they argue the company is overstepping. Anthropic's stance is that piracy breaches its terms of service. It is also reasonable that the company wants to shield itself from legal action by the studios involved.

Collateral damage for legitimate projects

The block is not limited to copyrighted games. Users report that reverse-engineering work no longer functions in Opus 5.5, even when applied to code they wrote themselves.

That likely affects projects that use Claude Code to build alternatives to Photoshop and other creative apps without paying subscriptions, as well as efforts to decompile old games and port them to platforms they were never released on.

Some users have kept their projects going by dropping back to Opus 4.8, though it is unclear how long that will work. Anthropic has promised to review and update the restriction so it is balanced and does not hinder genuine use of Claude Code, but complaints keep growing.