Will Claude still help you make a game?

By George In The Meta · 3 Nov 2026

Short answer: yes, as long as the game is your own idea. Claude Code's instructions now tell it not to build "a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original." Original games, games in a genre and games built from your own designs and assets still work. I think it's a fantastic rule.

What did Anthropic change?

Two sentences went into Claude Code's prompt, spotted by an X user around 27 October in the reported prompt change: "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

When Game Developer asked, an Anthropic spokesperson pointed it to a post on X by Addy Osmani, who works there: "We added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy." He added that "Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working."

There are also reports of GitHub users being blocked from making digital modules for board games, and from recreating a board game they own for personal use.

Does it get in the way of honest work?

It depends. Because if your honest work was already cloning someone else's, then it wasn't very honest to begin with, right? I think it's a fantastic rule.

I've not cloned other people's games when I've been making my AI little game projects, and I can see quite a few people that I know who will come across this and be told get hecked. Because yeah, I think the cloning thing of it was disgusting.

How fast can AI copy an app?

I used an example to show someone once that was building a breathing app how quickly the top breathing app they were trying to emulate could be copied and reproduced, and I did it within 30 minutes. Obviously it never went to production, it never went anywhere. It was just a proof point that what he was doing, trying to clone it, was a long route to the same outcome.

Should every AI model block game clones?

I think more models should do it. I don't think it should just be Anthropic. I think it should be all of the models. Eurogamer points out that other tools, such as Deepseek, still don't have a restriction like this.

Was the AI clone flood at Steam Next Fest real?

When I counted AI disclosures at Next Fest, 35% of the store pages I checked disclosed AI. With the amount of AI games that were in there, I guarantee you there are components that were just dead ass cloned. I think the amount that was there, even if they weren't direct clones, partial clones and partial pieces just fully ripped and cloned into a new game, is bad.

Does it change how I build games?

Not at all. Not at all. It's just, unfortunately, I found that unlike a large majority of the internet, I have a rather inconvenient moral compass that doesn't let me just do that.