Anthropic's Claude AI blocks video game cloning and reverse-engineering

One of the new threat models of local LLMs, especially abliterated ones, is hidden instructions or activation words that obscured trigger tool calls which exfil data.

For people touting about how their software can destroy the world, they aren't awfully creative on how it can achieve that. Hacking breaches of IP was probably most cynicists' top 3 questions asked when presented with the idea of "boosting productivity". If you make it "10x" faster to write code, you make it 10x faster for a hacker to hack. Naive cryptographic principles are less about an ironclad security and more about encryption that takes too much time to brute force. It all leads to one thing.

I'm still fairly adamant that those claims are mostly a myth. Because the worst inefficiencies in any workplace has little to do with the individual productivity of the proletariat. And because much of the most valuable work lies in creativity, ingenuity, and subtleties that lies outside of an LLM's expertise.

But loosely speaking, a lot of hacking does in fact come down to a lot of boring, repetitive tasks. Something a machine has always been king of.

Theyre already here. Theyre slower, but if you have 128GB And watts+time, you can so it.

Imvestors should be better. We dont need new models to do this, its now the hardware cartel propping up prices. Break that dam and moats gone Sam.

Nvidia, openai, anthropic; they know it now. 1 "frontier" model is for the 1%. Is equal to 10 models for ths majority.

The U.S. labs may try to prevent their LLMs to be used for large-scale replicating of all software, hacking, etc, but I don’t understand the view that those things are history - I think they will become incredibly commonplace, especially if there aren’t any cross-industry standards. Do you really believe that it won’t become more commonplace over time?

> can't wait for the day when you end up in jail for the wrong prompt

I also can't wait for yesterday.

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-man-allegedly-dis...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1004747/...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/27/chatgpt...

The irony is that the whole generative AI industry is built mostly on stolen IP including the whole internet and tons of creative materials that were not intended to feed this monster.

It's only morally just if this creation of theirs consumes EVERYONE, including corporations, and not just the working class and creators.

Banning reverse engineering (and any non-life-threatening use cases) is exactly the thing that prevents the emerging system to balance itself.

They create imbalance and it will backfire.

You say that like it’s a problem? Sounds like the junkies have to be fed one way or another.

> ... permitted?

Under the expansively vague copyright provisions added thanks to Hollywood lobbyist pressure in the 80s & 90s to deter physical media piracy (Sony Betamax / DeCSS DVD), basically nothing except fair use is clearly "permitted."

However, in practice, a lot of historical retro preservation and emulation for personal use is 'tolerated', as long as it's titles long out-of-print, strictly non-commercial (no one makes money) and kept relatively low-key. Projects like MAME and RetroArch have existed for decades doing truly wonderful work.

While manual decomp / recomps existed in the scene, the 2020 release of the amazing Super Mario 64 decomp SM64 showed that hundreds of hours of painstaking work could unlock ports, deep mods, community translations/expansions, and academic study of classic titles. In the last couple years decomp/recomp has been turbo-charged with LLM agent assistance. Of course, there's now the usual spectrum between carefully guided, curated efforts being accelerated and generally unhelpful slop.

I've been into retro preservation for decades now and the recent explosion of interest, new projects and contributors has been great but there's also concern too much attention, too quickly could attract profiteers who 'cross the line' the community has been careful to avoid, triggering a legal crackdown. So, welcome to the community but please try to not screw up a good thing.

Generally speaking, free emulators without game code or content are fine but free decomps even without original binaries or game assets are a little bit fuzzier. They could be closer to the line but 'how much closer' depends on how it's implemented and the degree to which a company sees it as commercially threatening. So far, there's been no sign of issues but the retro and preservation communities have been careful not to release decomps or recomp ports of titles currently (or recently) for sale. Of course, if someone does a recomp port just for their family and friends, no one will know or care, and if something anonymously ends upon a torrent site, that's just 'software piracy' and on the other side of the firewall. As always, don't talk about or link to that stuff in retro and preservation forums.

Cloning existing games can be done with little to no work.

Building something new is challenging, with or without AI its orders of magnitude slower than copying.

Building something new is also risky. Copying something with proven vitality is less so.

Given this almost tautologically you should expect way more clones than novel things.

I have not explored this but If I wanted Claude Code to make a spiritual successor to Punch Out I would first have it clone Punch Out to see if it was capable of doing this, then if it worked I'd start changing the assets and mechanics one idea at a time until I had something with more novelty behind it.

Nostalgia

besides what the others replied, cloning can be done by people with very little skill in the area and in general it's always way easier to work from a proven design (existing game) than to come up with one from scratch.

As a game designer the answer is very obvious: That's hard work!

As a heavy LLM user there is another obvious answer: The LLM is very good at copying.

I suppose those are two sides of the same coin. All the hard decisions and all the creativity is already done.

Those aren't the only options though. I've long told people that want to get into game dev that the best thing to do is mod their favorite games. I'm hopeful that the technical ease to do that now leads to a lot of human creativity being expressed.

I've worked on private servers for a few games that were shut down, starting long before LLMs were invented. The answer in these cases is that human culture has value to most people. Not only are the gameplay experiences themselves valuable to preserve for new and old players alike, but they also embody periods of time that were in some ways better. As a child, a large amount of my social experiences played out through MMO-type games, which future generations probably won't have, given how worldwide social media controls are effectively requiring people to have an online speech license. Even if such an experience could never legally be rolled out on a large scale again, it's still probably worth holding onto what you can, for smaller communities.

Decomps take the preservation of human culture a step further. In my projects, it has become clear that Windows is no longer a reliable platform, and x86 has a sketchy future, but decompilations can help keep a game alive by moving it somewhere else for the sake of accessibility. They also enable further understanding (whether by AI or people) of the game, along with fixing it and expanding upon it.

Vibing a new experience is valuable, but it's not a substitute for what's already been made.

Bait

Imagine there is a game you used to enjoy some time ago, but its servers got shut down, updates changed it in a way you don't like or [insert another N reasons why its not playable anymore]. You don't want a new game, you want to play that exact game.

Now you can just obtain an old build and resurrect it for your own good.