Claude Refuses Requests to Clone Existing Games, and Users Say Analysis Work Is Blocked Too
Users report that Claude is turning down requests to recreate existing games and some analysis tasks. Anthropic says that authorized, lawful security research is exempt from its ban on unauthorized intrusion, and that a blocked response does not by itself mean a policy violation.
Anthropic’s Claude has been reported to refuse requests to recreate existing games exactly as they are. In an October 31 report, Tom’s Hardware relayed user accounts of encountering these blocks while using Claude Code or Claude Opus 5.5. The people affected were using AI for game development and program analysis.
The report rests on users’ own claims and the prompts they shared. Some users said that even ordinary reverse engineering requests with no malicious intent were blocked. Reverse engineering is the practice of taking apart an existing program to study how it works.
What Anthropic’s policy actually prohibits
Anthropic’s official usage policy prohibits infringing on other people’s intellectual property rights. It also prohibits breaking into someone else’s systems without permission. That means requests to recreate a game or analyze a program are judged less by what the task is called than by whether the work infringes someone else’s rights and whether the user has authorized access.
The clause barring unauthorized intrusion, on the other hand, does not prohibit security research and testing carried out on systems you own or operate. The same goes for work done with the system owner’s permission or within the scope of an approved vulnerability disclosure program. There is a condition attached, though: the work has to comply with applicable law. Anthropic explains that real-time safeguards may block some responses. It has also stated that a blocked response does not in itself mean the usage policy was violated.
Claude has been covered before in the context of game-related work. Tom’s Hardware previously featured a case in which someone used Claude to build a program that runs NES games.
Is it blocked the same way in South Korea?
South Korea is one of the regions where Anthropic says Claude is available. Korean is also among the languages supported in the web and desktop apps. That makes this relevant to users in South Korea who use Claude for game coding or program analysis. Whether the blocks described in the report apply in the same way to Korean-language requests, however, has not yet been confirmed.
What really matters is which requests get refused. Asking for a copy of an existing game and running an authorized security test differ in both purpose and conditions. Only when the prompts, the target programs, and the models used in these reports come to light can users compare them against their own work.
The key questions going forward are which conditions trigger a refusal to recreate a game, and whether authorized analysis work is getting caught as well. A more specific explanation from Anthropic, along with whether the blocks reappear under the same conditions, will provide the basis for judging that.