Anthropic relaxes game development limits for Claude Opus 5.5

Anthropic previously added two rules to Claude Opus 5.5's system prompt to stop users from copying existing games with Claude Code. The rules required the model to avoid recreating other people's games. As a result, even when users only mentioned a game as a gameplay reference, Claude Code could refuse the task, which upset many developers.

Anthropic engineer Addy Osmani said on X that the game development limits for Claude Opus 5.5 have been adjusted in Claude Code version 2.1.317. Users can now reference the gameplay and mechanics of existing games, and the model will no longer refuse to build a game just because of that.

Under the new rules, users can mention an existing game and ask Claude to build an original game of the same type based on its mechanics. But if users clearly ask to copy the original, Claude will still refuse a direct clone and suggest making a game with a similar experience instead.