Claude Code refuses to rebuild existing games — even renamed ones

Anthropic slipped a two-sentence rule into Claude Code on its Opus 5.5 model: build original games, genre games, and games from the user's own designs and assets — but never a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original. The rule surfaced October 27 through a server-side flag, and Anthropic confirmed it on October 30.

The crackdown follows a flood of AI remakes onto storefronts: Polygon reports indie developers pulled public playtests — including the Drunken Goddess Reflux demo at Steam Next Fest — rather than risk vibe-coders cloning their games before release.

The catch is in the mechanism: it is a prompt instruction, not a hard block, and open-weight models carry no such rule at all — while some developers say Claude has already refused work on their own projects, leaving them to appeal to Anthropic staff to get unblocked.