Anthropic tells Claude not to recreate existing games, and critics call it a token gesture
Anthropic added a line to Claude's game-building instructions telling it to make original games, genre games or games from a user's own assets, and not to recreate a specific existing game "even if it is renamed." Aftermath's Riley MacLeod argues this will do little against the flood of clones: other tools remain, and LLM safeguards are easy to talk around, for instance by describing a plumber with a mustache instead of naming Mario.
Eurogamer reports that some users doing what they call legitimate work, such as single-player versions of owned board games, have been refused. MacLeod doesn't see that as an unintended consequence, and says the change mostly helps Anthropic look concerned about theft while it keeps training on others' work. She also doubts that slop games are the core threat to the industry, and concedes the rule is marginally better than nothing.
CounterpointAnthropic, via employee Addy Osmani, says the change is meant to keep Claude from helping infringe IP, which its usage policy already prohibits, while leaving original and genre games intact. Defenders of that approach would say a guardrail that isn't airtight still raises the effort needed to clone a game.
Previously: Aftermath reported that itch.io's daily new game pages had doubled in two months while its voluntary AI tag was widely ignored. — Monday November 2 edition.