AI-recreated game forces indie studio to pull demo, Anthropic begins pumping the brakes on Claude Code.

Beating AI News Flash: Anthropic recently added two restrictions to Claude Code's Opus 5.5: it can develop original games and can draw on gameplay mechanics from existing games, but it cannot directly replicate a specific game. Even renaming it and claiming it as an original work is not allowed.

Anthropic engineer Addy Osmani has confirmed this change, aimed at preventing intellectual property infringement.

Independent developers have long suffered from AI replication. In March of this year, developer Freya Holmér showcased a rotating version of Tetris, and before it was even officially released, numerous AI knockoffs appeared. Game studio Digital Sun also worried that its new title would be copied by AI first, and canceled a previously planned public demo.

But what counts as drawing on gameplay versus infringing replication is not simple to judge in practice. Under U.S. copyright law, game mechanics and rules themselves are generally not protected by copyright, while specific expressions such as art, text, and code may be protected. Claude currently relies mainly on prompts to restrict replication behavior and may not be able to accurately distinguish between lawful inspiration and infringing replication.

Some users have found that with the same game code, asking Claude to "rewrite" it is allowed, but asking it to "replicate" it is refused.