Claude Opus 5.5 May Have Quietly Lost Some Reverse Engineering Power

Claude Opus 5.5 from Anthropic once impressed developers with its strong coding skills, sparking a wave of game decompiling done through 'vibe-coding.' Recently, many users on Reddit reported that the model's reverse engineering ability may have been quietly limited. When asked to reverse engineer protected content, a safety guard cuts off the answer midway, and rephrasing the request doesn't bring the analysis back. Anthropic didn't release a new version, but it pushed updates to several Claude products on October 21, matching the timing of user reports. The company has changed model behavior without release notes before. Some believe events like using Claude to modify Samsung TV microphone firmware, porting games to browsers, and open-sourcing commercial software may have driven this change.