Comment by tristanj
15 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.
>copyright lawsuits
Absolutely the thing they care about. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/10/27/professors-books-pirate...
Old news and irrelevant. That incident happened in 2021-2022 when Anthropic was a tiny startup.
Now they're a big company and have actual lawyers. They won't make the same mistake again.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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