Yet another Hacker News

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

68 points firesteelrain 1 hour ago 50 comments

newprint 1 hour ago | parent

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.

genldd 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jsiepkes 1 hour ago | parent

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.

georgemcbay 59 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

cortesoft 30 minutes ago | parent

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

altmanaltman 57 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

jareklupinski 54 minutes ago | parent

> 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 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

spwa4 32 minutes ago | parent

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

jareklupinski 17 minutes ago | parent

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

drnick1 20 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

jareklupinski 15 minutes ago | parent

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

doginasuit 50 minutes ago | parent

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 42 minutes ago | parent

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 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

999900000999 24 minutes ago | parent

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!

madeofpalk 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

gnabgib 1 hour ago | parent

Small discussion (20 points, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50316635

bigyabai 1 hour ago | parent

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'...

TrevorFSmith 1 hour ago | parent

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?

pocksuppet 58 minutes ago | parent

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

malfist 41 minutes ago | parent

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

geraneum 1 hour ago | parent

Are they trying to push more users towards Chinese models?

fuzzythrowaway 59 minutes ago | parent

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 11 minutes ago | parent

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?

phendrenad2 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

gosen 57 minutes ago | parent

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

neko_ranger 56 minutes ago | parent

Unfathomably lame

throwa356262 56 minutes ago | parent

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 45 minutes ago | parent

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

tristanj 55 minutes ago | parent

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.

avaer 50 minutes ago | parent

> 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 47 minutes ago | parent

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 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

testing22321 48 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

tristanj 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

password54321 46 minutes ago | parent

>copyright lawsuits

Absolutely the thing they care about. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/10/27/professors-books-pirate...

LoganDark 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

YmFzZTY0ZGFkZHk 48 minutes ago | parent

No "fair use" claims this time? /s

mirashii 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

zedascouves 42 minutes ago | parent

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 40 minutes ago | parent

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

dayone1 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

Guillaume86 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

torben-friis 29 minutes ago | parent

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?

2TOUCH 26 minutes ago | parent

The irony is...

lousken 16 minutes ago | parent

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

fwlr 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

pierrekin 6 minutes ago | parent

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 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.