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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
> 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...
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 HN that's misinterpreting public perception on this topic because the hobbyist classic-game recomps dominate this feed.
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] threadThey 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.
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.
whoever owns the hardware
currently running 2x DGX Sparks and never thought to use a commercial model again
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
Some of us are just out of the AI race completely.
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.
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.
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.
I dont think Anthropic will agree with that statement.
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!
If I want to make a knitting forum, im not going to feel bad about deleting posts about reverse engineering video 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.
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.
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.
> 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'...
This is about stopping future issues (real or perceived) that could lead to legislation curtailing usage of their tools.
Because they're all about what's best for them.
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.
Is this really the same cowboys that recklessly breaks into others networks and instead of apologising proudly tells the world how they did it?
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.
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.
If future lawsuits come from other industries, then they'll likely add a blanket ban on other forms of reverse engineering.
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.
Absolutely the thing they care about. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/10/27/professors-books-pirate...
Now they have actual lawyers now. They won't make the same mistake again.
A block would be a bit harder to circumvent
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?
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.
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.