Claude won’t reverse-engineer games for you anymore | usagoldmines.com

“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.”

Osmani noted that “original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working,” while adding “if Claude turns down something that is yours, send it my way.”

Getting Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI models to reverse-engineer games, gadgets, and other products has become a buzzy trend over the past few weeks. One of the most popular AI hacks is aimed at trimming the bloatware on smart TVs, although Claude has reportedly started refusing TV-hacking prompts, too. 

Of course, reverse-engineering a game with Claude involves more than just asking it to “build me Grand Theft Auto.” A variety of GitHub projects have recently sprung up with detailed instructions and skills to help Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI models recreate existing video games.

There are also galleries displaying examples of games successfully reengineered by Claude, including everything from Diablo II and Grand Theft Auto 2 to The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and Harvest Moon.

The process generally involves having the AI “decompile” the ROM or binary that a PC or game console uses to run the game, thus working backward to get the human-readable source code. There’s nothing new about decompiling the machine code of old video games, but AI has made the process way easier and faster.

But whether you decompile a binary by hand or with AI help, reverse-engineering a copyrighted video game can land you in legal trouble.

Back in 2021, Grand Theft Auto developer Take Two filed suit against the developers of decompiled mods for Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The lawsuit was eventually settled after the mods were pulled from release.