Recently, as AI tools have greatly lowered the barrier to game development, the indie game industry is facing widespread anxiety that its works will be cloned and released by AI first. Many indie developers have even chosen to delay public betas or pull their demos entirely out of fear that their products will be maliciously copied by AI.

To address this industry pain point, Anthropic recently remotely pushed a hidden rule that users cannot turn off to versions of its AI tool Claude Code powered by the Opus 5.5 model. Under this rule, the AI is explicitly required not to replicate specific existing games. It may only assist developers in creating original games, games in established genres, and games based on users' own design assets.

Anthropic said the restriction was set according to its existing intellectual property usage policy. However, because the boundaries of this policy are still being explored, the company has also opened a feedback channel specifically to handle cases where legitimate requests may be mistakenly blocked.

Although the move is intended to protect game intellectual property, industry insiders point out that because the rule is a soft constraint at the prompt level, it can still be easily bypassed. At the same time, the line between cloning and ordinary genre games is often very blurry, making it easy to inadvertently harm legitimate community activities such as fan remakes, old-game ports, and mod development. In addition, restrictions from a single AI vendor are unlikely to fundamentally change the current state of the entire tool ecosystem.