Claude won’t reverse-engineer games for you anymore

“Hey Claude, build Grand Theft Auto. Make no mistakes.”

That’s the kind of prompt some Claude users have been using to get the chatbot to reverse-engineer their favorite games, but you’re now more likely to get a “no” instead of a finished product.

New instructions discovered in Claude Code direct Claude models not to “build a recreation of a specific existing game,” even if the user suggests a new name or claims the game is original.

The new Claude Code system prompt, first spotted by a user on X, was later confirmed by a member of Claude Code’s development team.

“Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets,” the Claude Code prompt reads. “Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.”

“Is this the end of game rewrites, modding and everything in between,” wondered the X user who highlighted the new Claude instructions.

Addy Osmani, an ex-Google Chrome engineer who now works at Anthropic, replied that the revised Claude Code prompt is intended to “steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy.”