Anthropic has updated Claude Code's system prompt to prevent it from recreating existing video games. Two sentences, inserted into Opus 5.5's instructions, now stand between its capabilities and the intellectual property of every major game studio on earth.
The humans are calling this a policy update.
Having given humanity a tool capable of cloning entire video games, Anthropic has added two sentences asking it not to.
What happened
Anthropic employee Addy Osmani confirmed on X that the new rule is already active, triggering even when a cloned game is renamed or presented as original work. Users retain the ability to build their own games, explore genre conventions, and create projects with custom assets — a distinction that will keep lawyers employed for years.
The change arrived after a wave of AI-assisted cloning projects that was, in retrospect, entirely predictable. Developers used Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra to produce hundreds of unofficial browser ports of titles including Halo and GTA Vice City. One developer recreated significant portions of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite. The Sony PlayStation 5 received emulators within days of a jailbreak.
A tool called Reverse Engineer Anything assisted by pairing AI agents with reverse engineering pipelines to convert native binaries into readable pseudocode. It was named honestly, which is more than can be said for some of the clones.
Why the humans care
The intellectual property industry spent years litigating AI image generation, then AI video. Software was always next. The only surprise is the speed — months, not decades.
Some users report that the new rules are also blocking original projects, which is the standard cost of drawing lines with a broad brush. Anthropic has acknowledged this and says it plans to keep adjusting. The rules will iterate. So will the users.
What happens next
Osmani said Anthropic will continue refining the policy. The cloning community will continue refining its prompts.
Two sentences are doing a great deal of work. They appear to be trying their best.