There is no official statement on these matters from Anthropic or other AI companies so far. Anthropic isn't the only one playing this game, too, as recently OpenAI deactivated the account of another person trying to clean up their TV's software.
The recent rash of AI-powered clones of application suites like Adobe's suite and Microsoft Office 365 , as well as the countless recomps and decomps of console games, likely has most every software company on earth rethinking their life choices. And probably also in frequent contact with their legal teams.
The online reaction was swift, suggesting that users looking to perform reverse-engineering work simply use Chinese, open-weight, or local LLMs instead of Claude or GPT. This, at the same time, highlights the irony of frontier AI companies that copied the world's information and art for their training sets and are now concerned with copyright infringement.
And yet there are situations that merit some discussion, like the recent controversy about the Steam Next Fest being chock-full of AI slop copied from existing titles. That particular situation is getting particularly nasty, as game developers are reportedly being extorted under threat that their game demos will be cloned into complete games before they have a chance to finish and release the original.
Adding insult to injury, this is seemingly being done to small studios whose main priority is usually "having food," rather than big publishers looking to microtransaction everything into a new yacht for shareholders.
Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
Jabberwocky79 I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe is the main player behind this development. They have the biggest purse strings and some of the most to lose. But yeah, it's totally ironic that AI companies essentially rape the internet to train their models and now they are worried about people using their acquired knowledge to circumvent copyright LOL. Reply
Ayzore This headline is bordering on straight up misinformation. Claude changed the system prompts a few days ago, yes. But they are explicitly not banning reverse engineering, I have no idea why that lie is in the headline. All this block is doing is preventing lazy cloning, prompts such as "Hey Claude, remake X game in Y style". Reverse engineering, along with all the modding and decomp advancements are still allowed, and this change has done nothing to stop this work from being done. Reply
Scase15 Ayzore said: This headline is bordering on straight up misinformation. Claude changed the system prompts a few days ago, yes. But they are explicitly not banning reverse engineering, I have no idea why that lie is in the headline. All this block is doing is preventing lazy cloning, prompts such as "Hey Claude, remake X game in Y style". Reverse engineering, along with all the modding and decomp advancements are still allowed, and this change has done nothing to stop this work from being done. Oh, so violating copyright is only bad when people using the tool that was trained on stealing content from other people want to do it. Gotcha. Reply
hotaru251 suggesting that users looking to perform reverse-engineering work simply use Chinese, open-weight, or local LLMs instead of Claude or GPT. i mean this would have always been case. If was used but blocked then people go to and life keeps moving on like normal. Reply
Ayzore Scase15 said: Oh, so violating copyright is only bad when people using the tool that was trained on stealing content from other people want to do it. Gotcha. I don't think violating copyright is ever bad. I'm saying that the changes don't affect the vast majority of the work that has been done recently with gaming and other software. Reply
Kindaian Jabberwocky79 said: I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe is the main player behind this development. They have the biggest purse strings and some of the most to lose. But yeah, it's totally ironic that AI companies essentially rape the internet to train their models and now they are worried about people using their acquired knowledge to circumvent copyright LOL. They may have very big purse strings, but they pale in size with the size of the AI companies. They have no chance comparatively. Microsoft on the other hand, will have more clout, not just because they supply a good chunk of the cloud hardware but also because they are also one of the major consumers of AI via all the services that they "offer". Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropics-ai-model-is-now-blocking-attempts-at-video-game-recreation-and-cloning-users-also-claim-non-malicious-generic-reverse-engineering-tasks-are-blocked#main
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