The gaming industry’s hot news over the last few weeks, apart from GTA VI, has been focused on reverse engineered games that, through the magic of vibe coding using Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 5.5 AI model, allowed users to create fully playable ports of older games via PC web browsers. The trend (which dives headfirst over the border of legality) became so popular, it might’ve given the gaming industry a collective migraine. Anthropic is now imposing tighter restrictions on Claude Code to prevent this from happening so frequently.

Reverse engineering a game using Opus 5.5 meant that players could technically enjoy older games on web browsers without waiting for remasters that may never come. In our observations, games like Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3, Need for Speed: Underground 2, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, among many others, could be played in web-based versions from beginning to end, complete with save states.



Anthropic employee Addy Osmani has now clapped back against reverse engineering efforts by adding “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 [its] usage policy.” Osmani claims that development on original games will continue to work but Anthropic is iterating on the rules to “try and strike the right balance.”

It’s not perfect and it’s still easy to get the AI model to ignore imposed restrictions with a little bit of prompt creativity, or otherwise avoid infringement terms by using careful language, but this might make it harder for vibe coders to keep at it. At least, that’s what Anthropic hopes will be achieved with these stricter limitations.

For now, you can still find plenty of web-based ports to play online (if they haven’t been struck by the copyright hammer yet), but newer “re-releases” might slow down in the coming weeks.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Original article on GLITCHED