Game developers have reported increasing refusals from Claude Code since late October, including cases involving projects they say they are legally entitled to develop.
Anthropic has not announced any policy changes, and no such changes appear in Claude Code’s changelog.
Tom’s Hardware said the company had not issued an official statement on the matter.
The owner of Conflict Simulations LLC, which creates personalised digital versions of board wargames for clients who already own the original games, said the problem began around 27 October.
In a GitHub issue filed on 30 October, the developer said Claude Code had started receiving what they described as a “server-side instruction” to refuse game-related tasks.
According to the report, sessions now reject such requests, citing an instruction prohibiting the reproduction of games.
“A blanket category rule against ‘games’ cannot tell the difference between piracy and commissioned professional work for a game’s owner.” The owner of Conflict Simulations LLC, on GitHub.
In a subsequent update, the developer said Claude Code sessions continued working on the projects after the reported instruction was introduced. The refusals only started after they asked Claude to check whether the rule applied to their work.
The restrictions persisted even when they opened new sessions using the same codebase.
One commenter suggested that the refusal instruction might have been retained in the project’s memory or Git history.
The developer said they would try clearing it.
