Anthropic Addresses Video Game Cloning With Minor Claude Update - CNET

One of AI’s biggest selling points is its ability to build things quickly. AI models can help users sort through mountains of files, generate videos that have Hollywood studios worried, and create everything from websites and businesses to custom video games. With what’s called vibe coding, ordinary people can build playable video games in minutes using simple text prompts in popular AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

But the AI company Anthropic appears to be drawing a line in the sand about what kinds of games its AI model Claude can make. If a Claude user is trying to recreate someone else’s intellectual property, the AI tool will decline to build it.

That’s according to Addy Osmani, an engineering leader at Anthropic who posted on X. He was responding to concerns that Anthropic had changed Claude Opus 5.5 to prevent it from generating copies of existing games, which could violate copyright rules and the company’s usage policy.

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“Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working,” Osmani said. “We’ll continue to iterate to ensure we’re striking the right balance.”

He offered to review cases where amateur game developers believe Claude wrongly refused their requests.

A representative for Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Homage versus infringement

Anthropic’s stance, as expressed by Osmani, acknowledges that using AI to try to clone a video game, even a simple one, could constitute intellectual property infringement, an issue that predates the rise of AI tools like Claude.

Even with the change, Claude will still generate video games that resemble popular hits from the past few decades. A CNET request to build a game “that resembled Breakout but with the word Claude on each brick” yielded a playable web version of the arcade classic, but not one that any video game fan would mistake for the original.

The same thing happened after Flappy Bird became a hit in 2014, spawning a wave of copycat games in app stores. Copyright infringement of games is complicated, said David Kocan, an intellectual property lawyer at Nixon Peabody who co-leads the firm’s esports and gaming team.

“This is something courts have wrestled with long before AI came along,” Kocan said. “The basic distinction has always been that copyright protects a game’s original creative expression, but generally not its underlying ideas, rules, or gameplay mechanics. Copyright protects the game you created, not the genre you helped popularize.”

You can’t copyright the concept of, say, a battle royal game or a side-scrolling platformer, which is why when a new type of game emerges as a hit, you’ll see many similar games.

“That distinction may sound straightforward in theory, but in practice, the line between borrowing an idea and copying someone’s creative expression can be blurry,” Kocan said. “That’s particularly true in gaming, where so much of the experience combines functional mechanics with creative expression.”

RTB Ruhan, founder and CEO of Null Station, an animation and video game art studio, said that AI has made it”fast and cheap” to cross the line into infringement, allowing people with no art or design skills to clone a popular game. But that doesn’t mean someone can publish or sell a cloned game without running into trouble.

“‘(Claiming) AI made it’ won’t protect them,” Ruhan said.

His studio uses a simple test.

“Remove the title and logo and ask whether a player could still tell the two games apart,” Ruhan said. “If they can’t, you’ve crossed the line.”

Are AI companies responsible for game clones?

Legal experts CNET spoke with said there are no laws requiring AI companies to outlaw game clones on their tools. But adding those guardrails could prevent trouble down the road, said Eric Blatt, a corporate, securities and intellectual property lawyer at Scale and a former examiner at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

“Anthropic is prudent to tap the brakes here,” Blatt said. “If Claude — Anthropic-owned software operating on Anthropic servers — receives an instruction to copy a game, and if Claude then copies the game, there is a facially plausible argument that Anthropic performed the copying. The chat logs would be a gold mine for the plaintiff’s counsel.”

Blatt said that litigation hasn’t kept pace with AI’s growth, but he thinks lawsuits could quickly follow if a rebuilt game made with AI directly threatens a company’s business model.

But some of those attempts could be stopped before they start if AI models refuse to make exact copies.

“Ultimately, copyright law draws the legal boundaries,” Kocan said. “But AI companies have to decide where they’re comfortable drawing their own. And those aren’t necessarily going to be the same thing.”