Mila Becker
Anthropic is drawing a line: Claude Code is no longer supposed to recreate existing games. Original game ideas, genre games and projects using your own designs and assets are meant to keep working. The background is the flood of AI-generated imitations that indie developers and players on Steam have been complaining about for weeks.
What did Anthropic change?
The change was first spotted by X user Chasm. According to his post, Claude Code received a new rule from Anthropic’s servers around 27 October 2026, internally named “tengu_heron_brook”. According to Chasm, there is no setting to turn it off. The wording of the rule:
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.
In other words: original games, games in a genre and games based on your own designs and assets are allowed. Recreating a specific existing game is not, even if it is renamed or presented as “original”.
Anthropic confirms the rule
Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, officially confirmed the change. In a reply on X on 30 October 2026, he wrote:
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 points to Anthropic’s usage policy, under which Claude must not be used to infringe intellectual property. According to Osmani, original games, genre games and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working. Anthropic plans to keep iterating on the rule to strike the right balance, and anyone who thinks Claude wrongly turned down their own project is asked to contact him directly.
Why now?
The rule does not come out of nowhere. During the last Steam Next Fest, many people complained about the sheer number of AI games, including conspicuous imitations of well-known concepts. You can read more in our news about the flood of AI games at Steam Next Fest. On top of that, AI models have become quite good at analysing and rebuilding code, as we already saw with AI ports of old games. Some developers therefore fear that their demos could be copied before the actual game is even released.
Our opinion
I think this step is the right one, even if it does not solve the problem on its own. Claude cannot check whether a game really belongs to you, and other AI models have no such rules. Still, it is a clear signal that at least one major AI provider is not simply waving game cloning through. It will be interesting to see whether others follow suit and whether Valve eventually steps in more strongly on Steam.
