Anthropic recently remotely issued a hidden rule to Claude Code running the Opus 5.5 model that users cannot disable, prohibiting it from replicating specific existing games. The tool may only assist in creating original games, genre games, and games based on users' own design assets. This rule is formulated based on existing intellectual property usage policies, and its boundaries are still being explored. The company has opened a feedback channel to handle cases where legitimate requests may be mistakenly affected. Recently, the game industry has been concerned that AI tools significantly lower the threshold for game cloning, and many indie developers have chosen to delay public tests or withdraw demos out of fear that their works will be cloned and released first by AI. This rule is a soft constraint at the prompt level, and it has problems such as being easy to bypass, blurry boundaries between replication and genre games, and easily causing accidental harm to legitimate community activities such as fan remakes, old game ports, and Mod development. Moreover, restrictions from a single vendor can hardly change the current state of the entire tool ecosystem.
