Anthropic Updates Claude to Stop It From Recreating Existing Video Games
AI company Anthropic has added instructions to its Claude chatbot that bar it from recreating specific existing video games. Original and genre games remain allowed.
Anthropic, the US artificial intelligence company, has changed the instructions for its Claude AI assistant so that it no longer helps users build recreations of specific existing video games. An X user was the first to spot the change. It matters because it touches on copyright protection at a time when AI tools are increasingly used to make games.
What the new instructions say
The instructions state that building original games, games within a genre, and games based on the user's own designs and assets is fine. Recreating a specific existing game is not allowed, even if it is renamed or presented as original.
Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, confirmed the change on X. He said the company wants to steer Claude away from recreating someone else's specific game, because using Claude to infringe intellectual property is against its usage policy. Osmani also clarified that original games, genre games and games made with a user's own designs and assets should be unaffected. Anthropic will keep iterating to strike the right balance, he added.
Background
The update comes amid a surge of AAA games, meaning big-budget titles, being decompiled with AI help and made playable in web browsers. Halo: Combat Evolved, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Grand Theft Auto V have recently appeared as vibe-coded fan projects.
Anthropic has dealt with intellectual property disputes before. Last year it agreed to pay a record $1.5 billion to settle a class action in which 500,000 authors accused it of using copyrighted material to train its AI models. More recently, the estate of Elvis Presley filed a suit against Anthropic for similar reasons.
