Anthropic Blocks AI Game Clones in Claude Opus Update
Anthropic has updated Claude Opus 5.5 with new restrictions designed to prevent the model from generating clones of existing video games. The update adds a rule to Claude Code stating: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.”
The move comes in response to weeks of Steam being inundated with low-quality AI-generated game clones, a phenomenon that intensified during Steam Next Fest earlier this month. Players reported their feeds being flooded with minimal-effort copies of both established titles and games that had only recently released demos. The proliferation of what the gaming community has termed “AI slop” has become a significant problem for legitimate developers, some of whom have seen months or years of work jeopardized by easy-to-create knockoffs.
Game developers expressed growing frustration with the situation, prompting Anthropic to take action. The company’s technical staff member Addy Osmani confirmed the rule change, which was first spotted by user Chasm on X (formerly Twitter). The update explicitly targets the use case of recreating specific existing games while still permitting Claude to help users develop original titles, games within established genres, or games based on users’ own assets and designs.
This represents one of the first major steps by an AI company to address the broader issue of AI-generated gaming content flooding digital storefronts. While the restriction aims to curb game cloning specifically, questions remain about whether similar measures across other AI platforms and stricter platform policies on Steam itself will be necessary to fully address the “AI slop” problem in gaming.