I agree this is about money and they don't want to be legally liable.

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.