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Claude Starts Refusing to Copy Games, but It May Already Be Too Late
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- DeepHorus
Anthropic recently quietly added a pair of “Do & Don’t” rules to the underlying configuration of its terminal programming tool Claude Code, explicitly prohibiting assistance in rebuilding any specific existing game, even if it is renamed, given a new identity, or claimed to be original. This prompt was discovered and made public by developer “chasm” and immediately sparked widespread discussion in the indie game developer community. The rules also delineate the permitted scope: assisting with the development of original games, games in existing genres, and games based on users’ own designs and assets.
这一补丁的出现并非偶然。过去大半年里，借助大模型对公开的开发视频做逆向拆解、抢在正版之前复刻上架的操作，已经普遍到荒诞的地步。抄袭者无需接触原作代码，只要把开发者公开的实机画面丢给 AI，模型便能推测出操作逻辑与数值节奏，拼出一套能够运行的代码框架。原本用于展示开发进度、吸引玩家的开发日志，如今反倒成了抄袭者的现成素材。
Anthropic engineer Addy Osmani publicly confirmed on social media that the team did add these two sentences to the system prompt for Opus 5.5, with the aim of preventing intellectual property infringement. After the new rules took effect, many developers working on mods or troubleshooting old projects found themselves caught in the crossfire—some merely wanted it to analyze a harmless piece of decompiled code or to perform a routine comparison of competitor physics collision, and they would still receive a cold refusal. Anthropic is clearly willing to bear this cost in order to patch things at the underlying level.
There are already examples proving how fast plagiarism can happen. The puzzle game 204Snake combines Snake with 2048’s merging mechanics. Its developer, full of anticipation, set up a Steam page and posted a long complaint on Reddit: before marketing had even begun, a pixel-for-pixel identical web game with the same name appeared online; the layouts of the first few levels matched the developer’s technical videos exactly, while later levels turned into dead ends mass-generated by AI. The knockoff was crudely made, but it did not miss out on monetization: the most basic “undo” action was locked behind a 30-second ad.
The Japanese indie developer Kamaboko’s Typing Magician suffered an almost identical fate. Since the beginning of this year, he had been editing his development process into short videos and publishing them on YouTube. Before the official game was even finished, a game with the same name and identical art layout and gameplay appeared on the Japanese indie game platform Unityroom. According to the Japanese media outlet AUTOMATON, the imitator admitted without any shame that he had simply ripped the development videos and thrown them directly into an AI, and this hastily generated imitation once climbed onto the platform’s popularity rankings.
Even more absurd is the case of “a fake catching a fake.” After developer Nas’s Needle in a Haystack Simulator became popular, more than 10 similar knockoffs appeared on Steam, and players first had to find which one in the haystack was the original; developer NoGlyph then publicly accused another work in the same genre of copying its code, saying that the other game had 13 classes with exactly the same names and that more than half of the related function code was identical—even an error message pointing to a Shader file that does not exist in the other game was left unchanged word for word. The Lithuanian two-person team Lazy Flock’s Haunted Paws had just appeared at Nintendo’s Indie World presentation, but the top of search results was occupied by Ghostly Whiskers, a knockoff that had already gone on sale in September.
Panic is spreading through the indie game circle. The developer of Moonlighter was forced to cancel the public beta of its new game ReVamp and retreat to private servers for internal validation; Japanese producer Lin Fengxiao, who made Abyss Carnival, changed the demo of their new game to a lottery system; Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please, went further and admitted that he now does not dare discuss any new idea in its embryonic stage in public at all. Development logs, playable demos, and exposure during new-game festivals—these conventional methods that once helped small teams build up wishlists—have now become a burden.
However, reproducing the code is still a long way from making a fun game. LocalThunk, creator of Balatro, once designed an independent currency system for rerolling in the shop, later deleted it after finding that it disrupted the pacing, and had friends playtest continuously for dozens of hours to repeatedly adjust it; after Slay the Spire 2 entered early access, it was repeatedly questioned by players over card strength and numerical balance and continuously revised. AI reverse engineering may be able to extract rules and numbers, but it is difficult to reconstruct why the developer kept a certain mechanic and why they deleted another. For Anthropic, whether this underlying patch can catch up with the already-running cloning business remains unknown.
