Anthropic takes steps to block Claude from reverse-engineering video games
mashable.com
mashable.com
This is about stopping future issues (real or perceived) that could lead to legislation curtailing usage of their tools.
Because they're all about what's best for them.
Is this really the same cowboys that recklessly broke into others networks and instead of apologising proudly told the world how they did it?
Every 6 months Anthropic publishes a report telling us how closer they have gotten us to extinction as if human life was just a game, yet now they draw the line at computer game modding??
They are also probably intentionally trying to create differentiation between their models and open models to strengthen the regulatory capture case of having the government ban open model use.
That is not a fair fight.
Companies like autodesk with a ttm revenue of $7.8 billion would probably have fiscally compelling cases (if not legally compelling) to pursue if reverse engineered tools cut into their revenue. That's without getting into class action cases.
Exactly.
Adobe had a FY2025 operating income of 8.7b on 23.77bn revenue. They employ over 33k people..
So Adobe alone has the money for a law suite that defends themselves from an existential threat, but I would imagine a class action.. It is, IMHO, just a matter of time before these companies put it together and take their shot.
Not OK for monetization: Someone vibecoded a clumsy clone of Alley Cat to the C64!
The service provider decides the terms and conditions, as long as they comply with the law. For example, Google decides whether pirated movies can be hosted on its cloud service, because it provides the cloud service. It's pretty clear.
In a pure capitalist system, competitors would emerge if the repressed service were genuinely in high demand and lawful. If it was not, then well, that's just how we regulate the world but this cannot be considered a case of one industry deciding the fate of another.
whoever owns the hardware
currently running 2x DGX Sparks and never thought to use a commercial model again
Right now I need 4 subscriptions to do what 1 used to do. And they're tightening it further, without announcing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320588
(technically it isn't even legal, since changing what people get after they've agreed to the sale is obviously highly illegal)
Not that they've ever actually announced how much a subscription buys you. In fact the token use for a task on the API is also not consistent, so even on the API you don't know. And then there's Sam Altman in interviews, where he says what he wants to do: you submit a prompt, ChatGPT sends you a price and just charges it.
i felt like commercials LLMs were "good enough" for my needs about 2-3 generations ago, so this clicked into my work/life needs perfectly
i got them right before they went up in price, but honestly, for the ability to know that i wont have my thinking "questioned"... priceless
Some of us are just out of the AI race completely.
Yes and this is why self-hosting is more important than ever. The issue with LLMs is the cost of hardware if you want something close to the frontier. But there is no excuse not to host your own files, email, media center, etc.
There's no reason not to have your own domain though. I've been using Migadu and the amount of flexibility that gives you is ridiculous. The only downside is the lack of push notifications, but if your email is so important that you can't wait for a refresh then I can't help.
YouTube is probably an instructive example here: they can refuse to host certain content on their servers, and this is Anthropic refusing to have the AI on their servers perform certain tasks.
I dont think Anthropic will agree with that statement.
Even without a computer, you could use a pencil and a notebook to write down some song lyrics without express written consent of Universal Music Group!
If I want to make a knitting forum, im not going to feel bad about deleting posts about reverse engineering video games.
I mean, from game company perspective, will they really care about their old games getting reverse engineered when their next big title can be clean-room recreated by anyone with the skill to write a sentence? Maybe creating a game similar to the next big release will be something that the AIs refuse to do next? Interesting times.
As an aspiring game developer myself, I guess reducing the accessibility of old games benefits me (but I don't like it)--and hey, if you can't get that old game to run, maybe we can vibe code for a weekend and make a new game that captures the same feeling.
Tetris copyright for example is still heavily policed.
I think however if games continue to be killed there should be a legal route towards the community taking ownership in whatever way is necessary.
Anyway, 99.99% of "clean room" vibe coded projects are 100% NOT putting in place the proper policies and controls.
It's the wild west out there right now.
But ofcourse the videogame industry has always turned a blind eye to it provided you don't make money from it.
Laws, ideally.
A block would be a bit harder to circumvent
Claude has already refused to perform incredibly not-security-relevant tasks, so I'm guessing it will simply not help with this now either. Today, I am, for the first time, looking into my own LLM hardware.
I'm saying this as a completely orthogonal conversation to regularisation, ethics, etc. It's just amazing to see how little value these companies place in the general public's perception of them.
Can you think of any other companies selling to the mass marker that care so little about it?
What they may be missing is that the domains in which it it's being used to great success is the pipeline to the expansion of is use into other domains.
Having said that, the potential legal issues of being a reverse engineering tool is a strong legal motivator. But I also doubt that any legal issues as a result of reverse engineering could be fatal to either Anthropic or AI/LLM usage; the tool, being general purpose, will allow for the legal responsibility to be put upon the person using it, especially if it's decided that Anthropic and OpenAI are protected national security assets.
Behind closed doors the elite will use the tech for (biological) weapons and reverse engineering though. Military applications, OK but don’t you dare put Sonic in Super Mario.
Now they are also blocking specific uses of their models, with a blast radius that also affects people with similar but unrelated use cases.
Add that to all the safeguards they already have added to their models for copyright infringement, security, and other "safety" features.
It does not seem to be a great strategy when faced by fierce competition from cheaper and/or open-weight models from countries like China that do not care about any of these.
Those are the ones that matter. :)
I don't see any company's blockade on this kind of activity having much impact. Too many models. Too much fun.
Given the rumors that the source code has been lost (and the fact that they open sourced the games before Tiberian Sun & Red Alert 2, and the ones after those), I felt like I was using the tokens for 'good'.
We'll see when it actually stops.
Decompilation of RA2
https://github.com/r-melvin/gagarin
Static recompilation of RA2
How would they know who's the original author or what the rights situation is?
Anthropic really needs to be considering the fact that a lot of those people will be working in IT--and when their bosses start complaining about the checks they're writing to Anthropic, they'll have solid experience with alternative solutions to suggest.
It’s a new tool to reverse engineer games in a specific context, and I’ve been using anthropic models to work on it.
I haven’t seen any increase in safeguards triggering or any negative effects in how quickly agents are able to make progress in this space.
To give an idea of scope it’s about 5000 commits, 500k lines of rust code, 100 Ghidra patches of work so far. Made in around 6 weeks worth of 8-15 agents working continuously.
> Like Claude Mythos Preview, GLM-5.3 has strong capabilities for autonomously building end-to-end cyber exploits. But GLM-5.3 is unlike other frontier models in that it has been released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse. https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...
Just sayin'...
Fable of The Scorpion and the Frog should always apply .
Uh, we're not allowed to use Claude to even mod games that fully support mods?
Based on how every time I ask it a virology question about SARS-CoV-2 and I get a refusal, I'm quite worried about how far-reaching this will be.
Then, they came for the people who wanted to reverse-engineer video games, and I did not speak out, for I find no amusement in seeing Mario take down Elden Ring bosses...
Finally, they banned me for a politically incorrect/inconvenient prompt (like asking for help defending Luigi in a debate or something), and there was no one left to speak out for me.
The cost of blocking videogame reverse engineering is trivial. They added three lines to the system prompt to exclude it and probably made a small update to their backend training classifiers. They give up the videogame reverse engineering market, which is a tiny future revenue stream and not worth much financially. In exchange they avoid hundreds of millions, maybe billions, in future copyright lawsuits.
Providing this service has negative expected value. It's better to cede the market to someone else.
Btw video games are by far the biggest entertainment industry in history.
If the way video games of the future are made is with AI, the logic might be reversed; giving up some lawsuits now, while missing out on large entertainment revenue in the long term.
But Minecraft is reverse engineered Infiniminer. Fortnite is reverse engineered PubG. LoL is reverse engineered DotA. This is literally how the industry works.
The next best thing is gonna be some degree of RE of existing stuff -- that's clearly what people want. Anthropic is just trying to placate the old guard, denying users what they want, and ultimately will be on the wrong side of history on this.
That's why I'm saying their move seems extremely short-sighted. They're locked in on the IPO at the cost of the future.
Taking inspiration from other games, i.e. implementing similar gameplay loops or mechanics from other games, is completely normal within the industry. Unless copyrighted, it's not illegal. Minecraft taking from Infiniminer, or LoL taking from DotA is industry practice. Claude doesn't prohibit this.
Reverse engineering, i.e. decompiling game binaries to extract source code and copyrighted assets, then generating derivative games using said materials, is grounds for a massive copyright lawsuit. Anthropic doesn't want a part of this. That's why Anthropic is preemptively prohibiting it.
Will the lawsuits not come from adobe? From big SaaS companies? From every other major piece of software any Joe will be able to duplicate with a single prompt in a few hours?
This admission is showing that Anthropic believes they might get in hot water for reverse engineering video games. Surely it applies to everything else.
If future lawsuits come from other industries, then they'll likely add a blanket ban on other forms of reverse engineering.
Adobe and other companies have been holding back because they are also using frontier models to keep pace. Suing Anthropic means getting cut off. But now that alternatives are proving themselves..
This, to me, is why Anthropic is rushing their IPO.
I simply can't imagine a company of Adobe's size (employing over 33k people and making 24bn annual revenue) is going to sit on the sidelines while this plays out.
And they are just one company. All faced with a technology that can simply copy all their hard work and investment in product development.
Absolutely the thing they care about. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/10/27/professors-books-pirate...
Now they're a big company and have actual lawyers. They won't make the same mistake again.