Anthropic tells Claude Code not to clone games, as AI copies spread on Roblox

Saturday, October 31, is Halloween, and fittingly, the AI gaming news this week has been about copies, clones and what counts as the real thing.

The biggest story came from Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude. It confirmed that it has added a rule to Claude Code, its tool that writes software from plain-language instructions, telling it not to recreate specific existing games. That rule lands in the middle of a wider worry among independent developers: that AI tools now make it fast and cheap to copy a game, sometimes before the original is even out. On Roblox, that worry has a very visible face this week, with near-exact copies of games like Counter-Strike and Sonic Generations turning up on the platform. And from the opposite direction, a certification body called Proudly Human has started labelling games that were made without generative AI, beginning with a small studio in Vancouver.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

Anthropic tells Claude Code not to recreate existing games

On Friday, Game Developer reported that a user on X who goes by Chasm had spotted a new rule inside Claude Code. According to Chasm, the update was pushed out sometime on October 27, and there is no way to switch the rule off.

The rule has two halves. The first tells the tool what it should keep doing: build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. The second draws the line: "Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

Anthropic confirmed the change. A spokesperson pointed Game Developer to a post on X by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff. Osmani wrote that the company had added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt, the standing instructions the tool follows, on its Opus 5.5 model. The aim, he said, is to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game, because using Claude to infringe IP is against Anthropic's usage policy.

A quick note on that term. IP, or intellectual property, is what a studio owns: a game's name, its characters, its art, its music and its code. Game mechanics on their own have historically had limited copyright protection, which is part of why copying the feel of a game has always been easier than copying the game itself.

Osmani also stressed what is not supposed to change. Original games, genre games and games built from your own designs and assets "are meant to keep working," he wrote, and he said Anthropic will keep iterating to strike the right balance. He invited developers to send him cases where Claude turns down something that is genuinely theirs.

Why now, and what the rule can't do

The timing is not random. Over the past few weeks, indie developers have been talking about what Game Developer calls fast-follow AI remakes: copies built quickly from a game's demo, trailer or screenshots that could reach the market before the original does.

Some studios have already changed their plans because of it. Digital Sun Games, the studio behind Moonlighter, scaled back a public playtest of its next game, ReVamp, and moved it to a smaller test through its Discord community starting October 29. The studio said it was concerned about games being "cloned, and published before the original is even out," and that with launch still months away, a large public build felt like too big a risk. It also made the case for why this matters to small teams: showing games early is how indies get seen and find their fans.

The same fear has reached South Korea. The Korean outlet Herald Business reports that local studios have pulled or cancelled demos after hearing that someone was using AI to copy their games. One team, YNOT, stopped public distribution of its demo for Spookitchen, and another, Garage Arts, cancelled the planned demo of Oh! Robot: Legendary Mechanic.

Platforms have been asked what they plan to do. At a developer conference in South Korea earlier this week, members of Valve's business team were asked whether Steam had measures to stop AI cloning. According to Game Developer's account of InvenGlobal's reporting, Valve's Tom Giardino suggested it was more a matter for law enforcement, and reportedly said Valve doesn't want to be a gatekeeper telling developers which tools to use. His advice was for developers to build active communities and trust, so players choose the original.

Against that backdrop, Game Developer is clear about its limits, and they are worth spelling out:

• Clever wording. Researchers and reporters have repeatedly shown that safety limits on AI tools can be sidestepped with rhetorical tricks.
• Ownership is hard to check. It's not obvious how a piece of software would know whether the person asking actually owns a game idea or its assets.
• Other models exist. People who want to clone games can switch to open-weight models that have no such rule.

An open-weight model is an AI model whose trained "weights", the numbers that make it work, are published, so anyone can download it and run it on their own computers. There is no company in the middle deciding what it will or won't do.

So the rule may only deter the most low-effort copycats. Still, as Game Developer puts it, developers may take some relief that Anthropic at least doesn't want to actively encourage mass game copying.

AI-assisted copies of real games turn up on Roblox

While the debate about rules goes on, the copying is already happening in public on Roblox, the platform where players make and share their own games.

It started getting attention on October 27. Dexerto reports that YouTuber KreekCraft shared a clip, originally from another YouTuber, SirDapper, of an experience called PlayStation Experience, built by a group called Redwing Works. It copied the PS4 home menu down to its trophies, web browser and server chat, and offered seven games, including The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Superhot and Undertale. Players also flagged a Counter-Strike copy called Project CS and a "1:1" recreation of Left 4 Dead 2. Dexerto says none of them had permission from the original owners.

Two days later, GosuGamers described it as a new wave of reportedly AI-assisted ports, featuring ripped assets and identical user interfaces from publishers including Valve, Bandai Namco and Sega. It points to a viral post showing a recreation of Elden Ring with similar audio, environments, cutscenes and combat, all in Roblox's art style.

GosuGamers also tried one of the ports itself: Sonic Generations Multiplayer, based on Sega's 2011 platformer. It found an exact copy of the original game, though with only one map, Green Hill. The person who says they made it, who goes by Sunny on X, said they used "AI-assisted tools" while manually debugging the game and making sure it worked as intended. That port had more than 8,000 visits since launching on October 24, but the same creator's Five Nights at Freddy's port has passed 4.7 million visits, according to GosuGamers.

It isn't only famous games, either. Herald Business reports that on October 14, a studio called Pandorio Games posted a demo video of its unreleased game Escape the Walls, about smashing through walls to break out of a prison. The video drew 2.2 million views in a day. Within about a week, at least seven look-alike games had been identified on Roblox, all created on or after October 15, the day after the video went up. Industry insiders quoted in the report point to AI development tools as the reason copies now appear so fast. The same report cites a Roblox survey of creators who use AI, in which 95% said AI had cut the time it takes to release a new game or update. That is Roblox's own number.

According to GosuGamers, many of these ports have been taken down, whether after warnings, by the platform itself or by their creators, but several remain available. Neither Roblox nor the affected developers had commented publicly on the latest ports.

Roblox does have an official route for using other people's games and brands. Dexerto notes that in September, Roblox expanded its licensing platform so creators can use established brands and share revenue with the companies that own them. The ports in this wave skipped that step.

A label for games made by people

The third story comes at the same problem from the other side. Instead of trying to stop AI copies, it tries to make human-made work easier to spot.

Proudly Human, an organization that certifies human-created content, products and services, announced on October 29 that it has expanded into video games. It describes its trust mark as "similar in spirit to Certified Organic or Fairtrade certification."

Its first game company is Charm Games, an independent studio in Vancouver with roots in VR that has since moved into PC and console games. The certified game is The Orphaned House, a first-person mystery adventure planned for Steam in 2027. In a fitting Halloween touch, you wake up in a house with no memory and work through its rooms and puzzles to uncover its secrets.

Proudly Human says the game was measured against strict standards to make sure human authorship was established and kept up throughout production. The announcement doesn't go into detail on how those checks work. Charm Games can now put the trust mark on the game's artwork and promotional material, and call itself the first ProudlyHuman gaming studio.

The people involved were direct about why. Proudly Human's chairman, Alan Finkel, said that "AI has run rampant through the video game industry." Its CEO, Trevor Woods, said players are entitled to a label that lets them confidently choose human-created games. And Charm Games' studio director, Alan Jernigan, said players have voiced disappointment with low quality and a lack of creativity in games made with generative AI. He said he hopes the certification can be "a mark of trust for players."

Proudly Human also points to the most recent Steam Next Fest, saying more than one in three of the roughly 8,000 demos submitted carried generative AI disclosures. That is Proudly Human's own figure.

Whether players will go looking for a label like this, the way some shoppers look for organic food, is the open question. So is how many studios will want to go through the process.

The big picture

Put these three stories together and a pattern shows up. AI has made it much easier to copy a game, quickly and closely, and now different groups are each trying to draw a line in their own place.

AI companies are drawing it inside the tools, as Anthropic did with a two-sentence rule that it admits it will keep adjusting. Platforms like Roblox and Steam are being asked to draw it at the store level, and so far Valve has said it doesn't want to police which tools developers use, while Roblox hasn't spoken publicly about the latest ports. Studios are drawing it in their own plans, by holding back demos and playtests that would normally help them find an audience. And some, like Charm Games, are trying to make the line visible to players with a label.

None of these is a complete answer on its own. A rule in one AI tool doesn't cover the others. Takedowns come after the copy is already out. A certification only helps if players know to look for it. But for indie developers, who rely on showing their games early, the question of where these lines end up matters a great deal, and this week it moved from forum threads into company policy.