Anthropic takes steps to block Claude from reverse-engineering video games

151 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by firesteelrain
(mashable.com)

97 Comments

TrevorFSmith

15 hours ago

If they didn't want us to use other people's ideas without permission then why did they use other people's ideas without permission to make the ideal tool for using other people's ideas with permission?

10111001

4 hours ago

> If they didn't want us to use other people's ideas without permission then why did they use other people's ideas without permission to make the ideal tool for using other people's ideas with permission?

Because they're all about what's best for them.

pocksuppet

14 hours ago

They want them to steal everything, they just don't want us to.

malfist

14 hours ago

It seems all too common these days for tech startups to try to wall off a common good and try to sell access to what used to be free

nyorai

9 hours ago

These days? This is how spotify was found. Its same playbook. Steal everything and then do regulatory capture.

phil-martin

13 hours ago

I don’t think it’s about what Anthropic does or doesn’t want us to use their tools for. They are in the business of selling compute via AI, the more people that use it the better.

This is about stopping future issues (real or perceived) that could lead to legislation curtailing usage of their tools.

throwa356262

14 hours ago

These guys are no fun at all.

Is this really the same cowboys that recklessly broke into others networks and instead of apologising proudly told the world how they did it?

Every 6 months Anthropic publishes a report telling us how closer they have gotten us to extinction as if human life was just a game, yet now they draw the line at computer game modding??

natebc

14 hours ago

And stole every bit of Intellectual Property they could get their hands on legally or otherwise.

elevation

8 hours ago

I wanted to reverse engineer a win-xp era game with boring music and make it play my own selections--inherently a fair-use activity. The game was somewhat obfuscated, so while I've used ghidra successfully at work, I wasn't able to work out how the game's system design even after a saturday of poking at it.

Claude has already refused to perform incredibly not-security-relevant tasks, so I'm guessing it will simply not help with this now either. Today, I am, for the first time, looking into my own LLM hardware.

peauc

2 hours ago

FWIW, Codex is a lot more permissive.

genldd

15 hours ago

Is this.. The right approach? Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't? I don't have a solution to offer, but I bristle at the idea of one indistry deciding which other industries suffer the negative externalities of their product, while others they decide are spared.

jareklupinski

14 hours ago

> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?

whoever owns the hardware

currently running 2x DGX Sparks and never thought to use a commercial model again

cyberpunk

14 hours ago

Curious about your setup if you don’t mind elaborating a bit for us? What models are you using and how do you find they compare? The 128gb model costs less than one months salary for a medium level engineer here, they look quite attractive.

anakaine

8 hours ago

A month and a half salary after tax here. That is still particularly expensive, and besides its sinking money into a steeply depreciating asset.

waych

5 minutes ago

You mean appreciating? They have doubled in price since release...

kotaKat

3 hours ago

That’s about five months of wages up here in rural nowhere NY doing IT, for what it’s worth.

Some of us are just out of the AI race completely.

jareklupinski

14 hours ago

i've been running DeepSeekV4 flash but looking at the other models being suggested around, best part is switching to test has 0 cost :)

i felt like commercials LLMs were "good enough" for my needs about 2-3 generations ago, so this clicked into my work/life needs perfectly

i got them right before they went up in price, but honestly, for the ability to know that i wont have my thinking "questioned"... priceless

spwa4

14 hours ago

Best model on 2xSpark currently is GLM 5.3 flash ... but really does require 2x Spark. 25 to 60 tok/s with MTP.

anakaine

8 hours ago

2x Spark? As in two DGX Spark machines? That is obscenely expensive.

cyberpunk

5 hours ago

Is it? How much would it cost to hire a person to do the same work two of these can do?

hamdouni

2 hours ago

Maybe fair to compare to using AI subscription ~20$/m (not Anthropic neither Openai)

spwa4

2 hours ago

Especially now with OpenAI constantly changing (and always reducing) what the subscription can do ... At least it will keep working.

Right now I need 4 subscriptions to do what 1 used to do. And they're tightening it further, without announcing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320588

(technically it isn't even legal, since changing what people get after they've agreed to the sale is obviously highly illegal)

Not that they've ever actually announced how much a subscription buys you. In fact the token use for a task on the API is also not consistent, so even on the API you don't know. And then there's Sam Altman in interviews, where he says what he wants to do: you submit a prompt, ChatGPT sends you a price and just charges it.

drnick1

14 hours ago

> whoever owns the hardware

Yes and this is why self-hosting is more important than ever. The issue with LLMs is the cost of hardware if you want something close to the frontier. But there is no excuse not to host your own files, email, media center, etc.

multjoy

13 hours ago

Email is, given the issues with connectivity, something you can justifiably make someone else's problem.

There's no reason not to have your own domain though. I've been using Migadu and the amount of flexibility that gives you is ridiculous. The only downside is the lack of push notifications, but if your email is so important that you can't wait for a refresh then I can't help.

jareklupinski

14 hours ago

same as self-hosting email/webservers though, you dont need world-class hardware for personal projects. frontier models may be more capable but a smaller model can just as easily work through a project you break down for it

jsiepkes

15 hours ago

This about the risk of getting sued by parties with deep pockets. Antrophic is close to an IPO so that is definitely not the kind of attention they want.

cortesoft

14 hours ago

There are no content owners that have close to as deep of pockets as the big AI companies

Rapzid

3 hours ago

The money we are talking about.. A lot of these rights holders have more than enough cash on hand to bring a suite and potentially destroy Anthropic/OpenAI with the right case.

georgemcbay

14 hours ago

> This about the risk of getting sued by parties with deep pockets.

They are also probably intentionally trying to create differentiation between their models and open models to strengthen the regulatory capture case of having the government ban open model use.

Rapzid

3 hours ago

Can't put the cat back in the tube

doginasuit

14 hours ago

I can see your point, but on the other hand it seems like the only alternatives are a blanket ban on reverse engineering or a blanket allowance. I probably don't have to make the case for the value of reverse engineering here, so the question is to what degree it can be abused and if they have the responsibility to stop it. I would argue companies do have an obligation to consider and mitigate abuse of their product, especially frontier technologies. Probably the best outcome will be some kind of balance of judgment by the company.

ada-h00k

14 hours ago

A blanked allowance would be the answer. Claude is just a tool, after all. Neither Ghidra nor IDA tells me what I'm allowed to decompile and what I'm not. If someone then uses it to create something whose distribution would constitute a copyright infringement, that is the responsibility of the person who did so, not the software manufacturer.

ben_w

14 hours ago

Several AI companies are getting sued for what their products allow users to do, as was Google for what YouTube allowed its users to do.

YouTube is probably an instructive example here: they can refuse to host certain content on their servers, and this is Anthropic refusing to have the AI on their servers perform certain tasks.

sumedh

8 hours ago

> Claude is just a tool

I dont think Anthropic will agree with that statement.

999900000999

14 hours ago

Looks like we need to ban paper. Paper can be used to reproduce copyrighted material.

Even without a computer, you could use a pencil and a notebook to write down some song lyrics without express written consent of Universal Music Group!

Buttons840

7 hours ago

We're already knocking on the door of just clean-room recreating any game or experience in one shot. In such an environment, who really cares about reverse engineering old games?

I mean, from game company perspective, will they really care about their old games getting reverse engineered when their next big title can be clean-room recreated by anyone with the skill to write a sentence? Maybe creating a game similar to the next big release will be something that the AIs refuse to do next? Interesting times.

As an aspiring game developer myself, I guess reducing the accessibility of old games benefits me (but I don't like it)--and hey, if you can't get that old game to run, maybe we can vibe code for a weekend and make a new game that captures the same feeling.

willtemperley

5 hours ago

> who really cares about reverse engineering old games?

Tetris copyright for example is still heavily policed.

I think however if games continue to be killed there should be a legal route towards the community taking ownership in whatever way is necessary.

Rapzid

3 hours ago

"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy..

Anyway, 99.99% of "clean room" vibe coded projects are 100% NOT putting in place the proper policies and controls.

It's the wild west out there right now.

expedition32

an hour ago

I think from a legal perspective modding is technically a violation of the ToS.

But ofcourse the videogame industry has always turned a blind eye to it provided you don't make money from it.

plaguuuuuu

13 hours ago

It's the wrong approach, because the public demand to reverse engineer games (a pretty benign activity, for humans at least not corporations) is massive and a new subset of hackers who will release public jailbreaks that could be used for hacking which is more of a grey area

madeofpalk

14 hours ago

Ultimately, the person offering the service gets to decide what the service is.

If I want to make a knitting forum, im not going to feel bad about deleting posts about reverse engineering video games.

altmanaltman

14 hours ago

> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?

The service provider decides the terms and conditions, as long as they comply with the law. For example, Google decides whether pirated movies can be hosted on its cloud service, because it provides the cloud service. It's pretty clear.

In a pure capitalist system, competitors would emerge if the repressed service were genuinely in high demand and lawful. If it was not, then well, that's just how we regulate the world but this cannot be considered a case of one industry deciding the fate of another.

mirashii

14 hours ago

They really didn’t though. They put it in a client side modification to the system prompt. You can just rip it out with a proxy or a small local modification to your client, which Claude will be happy to do for you. They took a token step so that people would write these headlines in the hope it would stave off more negative attention in the video game world without actually doing anything meaningful.

Tepix

5 hours ago

Sounds like an illegal DMCA circumvention device. Handcuffs! (IANAL)

whycome

12 hours ago

Can you ask Claude to help with the modification of the local client?

dgellow

13 hours ago

You’re literally describing how they did set up a block, while also saying they didn’t

mirashii

12 hours ago

If they tried to stop terrorists from making biological weapons in the same manner, the headlines would call that useless and ineffective because you're trying to stop already bad actors with something ineffective and trivially bypassed. This is no different, and shouldn't be treated any differently.

bluefirebrand

12 hours ago

They're literally describing how it's not actually a block just a minor inconvenience

A block would be a bit harder to circumvent

newprint

15 hours ago

Game REs & crackers are probably the most persistent personality types you can find in software world. They are also one of the most technically sophisticated software engineers around. I expect we will see a new AI system pop-up soon, made by RE, specifically trained to RE games/software, thanks to this ban. Pandora box is open.

testbjjl

2 hours ago

They should be careful not to kneecap their product which would damage their valuation and number of subscribers in favor of trying to stop the inevitable.

umutsevdi

2 hours ago

I don't get it. What does this solve? Wasn't this tool just a skill file with a bunch of scripts? Can't any above-average harness and model drive it?

klipklop

10 hours ago

The things that normal people will want to use AI for (game mods) will be made illegal or a ToS violation until the only thing allowed is to consume veiled advertisements.

Behind closed doors the elite will use the tech for (biological) weapons and reverse engineering though. Military applications, OK but don’t you dare put Sonic in Super Mario.

zedascouves

14 hours ago

i ported the whole DungeonMaster 2 to .net. 90% with the first few 20 prompts, then quite some many to make it perfect. Just from the executables from those DosBox sites. Amazing.

malfist

14 hours ago

The first 90% is always the easy part. The second 90% is the hard part.

nonamee

6 hours ago

Not from my experience. Missing 10% were caused by medium effort and that agent was not able to do play tests. So it is just testing and issuing additional prompts. Nothing hard. No thinking required.

torben-friis

14 hours ago

I think that, excepting part of the HN crowd and linkedin, literally the only positive comments I've heard about AI have been related to game mods.

I'm saying this as a completely orthogonal conversation to regularisation, ethics, etc. It's just amazing to see how little value these companies place in the general public's perception of them.

Can you think of any other companies selling to the mass marker that care so little about it?

BLKNSLVR

12 hours ago

I think that they think, not necessarily incorrectly, that their tool is applicable across any and all domains, so restricting a few of these domains is small fry in the overall big picture.

What they may be missing is that the domains in which it it's being used to great success is the pipeline to the expansion of is use into other domains.

Having said that, the potential legal issues of being a reverse engineering tool is a strong legal motivator. But I also doubt that any legal issues as a result of reverse engineering could be fatal to either Anthropic or AI/LLM usage; the tool, being general purpose, will allow for the legal responsibility to be put upon the person using it, especially if it's decided that Anthropic and OpenAI are protected national security assets.

blargey

7 hours ago

On the contrary, this reads to me as a response to the "we're taking down our game demos because we can't risk AI decomp-cloning attempts" and "oh you released a promising demo for your indie game? Pay me $200 not to make a slop clone of it and release it before you" incidents that have gathered attention outside HN, and it's the average HN commenter that's misinterpreting public perception on this specific topic because the hobbyist classic-game recomps dominate this feed.

geraneum

15 hours ago

Are they trying to push more users towards Chinese models?

jayces

2 hours ago

they haven't seen anything yet, this is just the beginning. reverse-engineering is here to stay and there's nothing anyone can do about it. they brought the idea of AI to make us jobless, now the same AI is reciprocating the same energy and they don't like it?

pierrekin

14 hours ago

I am busy working on an embarrassingly ambitious game reverse engineering project. (To the point where admitting what it is feels like telling someone you’re working on a perpetual motion machine).

It’s a new tool to reverse engineer games in a specific context, and I’ve been using anthropic models to work on it.

I haven’t seen any increase in safeguards triggering or any negative effects in how quickly agents are able to make progress in this space.

To give an idea of scope it’s about 5000 commits, 500k lines of rust code, 100 Ghidra patches of work so far. Made in around 6 weeks worth of 8-15 agents working continuously.

tj-teej

13 hours ago

Out of curiosity what models do you use? How much would a project like that cost?

OptionOfT

12 hours ago

Very sad. I'm about 50% in taking the old Red Alert 2 and get to something that would've resembled the original source code.

Given the rumors that the source code has been lost (and the fact that they open sourced the games before Tiberian Sun & Red Alert 2, and the ones after those), I felt like I was using the tokens for 'good'.

We'll see when it actually stops.

silverFork

12 hours ago

They probably have reverse engineered the stuff for themselves and now closing the door behind them. That type of thing is quite common. For example MSFT copied some other operating system itself but theirs was holy. OpenAi used google's open source ai tools before openAi.

Fable of The Scorpion and the Frog should always apply .

lousken

14 hours ago

So they own a bio lab but we cant even reverse engineer? Touché, Anthropic

Guillaume86

14 hours ago

The most visible productivity gain I've seen from AI is in this kind of cool hoby RE stuff that just wasn't worth the time investment/resources before.

DustinPo

8 hours ago

This is why we need open models.

demo4567

5 hours ago

anthropic can go suck it

visarga

13 hours ago

The new copyright protects vibes

gosen

14 hours ago

It's not a surprise after so many IP violations recently that big guys will start blocking this stuff. But people who wants to reverse-engineer will just use Chinese or local models for that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't think it's going to help Anthropic / OpenAI with that fight, but this is something that have to do to make their investors happy

BatchJob

11 hours ago

Its not reverse engineering video games. Its being trained on them

dayone1

14 hours ago

Why does anthropic feel the need to babysit every one of their users? its so disgusting. Look - i get bioterrorism, weapons, etc and why you may need guardrails on those, but RE' games? come on.

LoganDark

14 hours ago

I wonder when someone will offer a truly uncensored model subscription. For some reason, it seems that nobody's been brave enough to find a country that wouldn't take them down for offering that service.

phendrenad2

14 hours ago

This is just prompt noise that any RE will be able to easily coax claude to ignore. It exists to get the big loserly game companies like Nintendo and Sony off their back.

bigyabai

15 hours ago

Also from Anthropic:

> Like Claude Mythos Preview, GLM-5.3 has strong capabilities for autonomously building end-to-end cyber exploits. But GLM-5.3 is unlike other frontier models in that it has been released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse. https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

Just sayin'...

vrganj

6 hours ago

Thanks for the recommendation, Anthropic!

fwlr

14 hours ago

Oh no little piglet, you’re not supposed to be eating at the dinner table with us. Your place is at the trough. Make sure you eat all your slop to grow up big and fat. Do that and I’m sure you’ll find yourself on the dinner table in no time.

2TOUCH

14 hours ago

The irony is...

bcvvvy

13 hours ago

Wait until they block what your business does.

nsingh2

14 hours ago

More paternalistic nonsense

fuzzythrowaway

14 hours ago

First, they came for the people who wanted to make kinky art, and I did not speak out, for I am a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition kinda dude...

Then, they came for the people who wanted to reverse-engineer video games, and I did not speak out, for I find no amusement in seeing Mario take down Elden Ring bosses...

Finally, they banned me for a politically incorrect/inconvenient prompt (like asking for help defending Luigi in a debate or something), and there was no one left to speak out for me.

phatfish

14 hours ago

Why was there no one left to speak for you. Did the AI apocalypse actually happen and it is just you and a rack running an instance of "Claude" left on earth?

tristanj

14 hours ago

A very rational choice by Anthropic.

The cost of blocking videogame reverse engineering is trivial. They added three lines to the system prompt to exclude it and probably made a small update to their backend training classifiers. They give up the videogame reverse engineering market, which is a tiny future revenue stream and not worth much financially. In exchange they avoid hundreds of millions, maybe billions, in future copyright lawsuits.

Providing this service has negative expected value. It's better to cede the market to someone else.

testing22321

14 hours ago

> In exchange they avoid hundreds of millions, maybe billions, in future copyright lawsuits.

Will the lawsuits not come from adobe? From big SaaS companies? From every other major piece of software any Joe will be able to duplicate with a single prompt in a few hours?

This admission is showing that Anthropic believes they might get in hot water for reverse engineering video games. Surely it applies to everything else.

Rapzid

3 hours ago

They are absolutely going to be getting sued by major software IP and copyright holders.

Adobe and other companies have been holding back because they are also using frontier models to keep pace. Suing Anthropic means getting cut off. But now that alternatives are proving themselves..

This, to me, is why Anthropic is rushing their IPO.

I simply can't imagine a company of Adobe's size (employing over 33k people and making 24bn annual revenue) is going to sit on the sidelines while this plays out.

And they are just one company. All faced with a technology that can simply copy all their hard work and investment in product development.

tristanj

14 hours ago

Video game reverse engineering is the biggest and most visible problem in the present moment, it's widely discussed in the media, and there are video game companies known to be very litigious against people who reverse engineering their products (ex: Nintendo). It makes sense to block the biggest problem first.

If future lawsuits come from other industries, then they'll likely add a blanket ban on other forms of reverse engineering.

avaer

14 hours ago

> They give up the videogame reverse engineering market, which is a tiny future revenue stream and not worth much financially

Btw video games are by far the biggest entertainment industry in history.

If the way video games of the future are made is with AI, the logic might be reversed; giving up some lawsuits now, while missing out on large entertainment revenue in the long term.

tristanj

14 hours ago

But that's not at all what Anthropic is doing. Anthropic is not blocking people from creating video games with AI. Using Claude to create new video games is completely valid and unrestricted; they just don't want people to use it for reverse engineering existing ones, as that opens them up to massive legal liability.

avaer

14 hours ago

I agree this is about money and they don't want to be legally liable.

But Minecraft is reverse engineered Infiniminer. Fortnite is reverse engineered PubG. LoL is reverse engineered DotA. This is literally how the industry works.

The next best thing is gonna be some degree of RE of existing stuff -- that's clearly what people want. Anthropic is just trying to placate the old guard, denying users what they want, and ultimately will be on the wrong side of history on this.

That's why I'm saying their move seems extremely short-sighted. They're locked in on the IPO at the cost of the future.

tristanj

10 hours ago

You are confusing game design inspiration with code/asset reverse engineering, which are entirely different things.

Taking inspiration from other games, i.e. implementing similar gameplay loops or mechanics from other games, is completely normal within the industry. Unless copyrighted, it's not illegal. Minecraft taking from Infiniminer, or LoL taking from DotA is industry practice. Claude doesn't prohibit this.

Reverse engineering, i.e. decompiling game binaries to extract source code and copyrighted assets, then generating derivative games using said materials, is grounds for a massive copyright lawsuit. Anthropic doesn't want a part of this. That's why Anthropic is preemptively prohibiting it.