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

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??

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.

Those are the ones that matter. :)

I don't see any company's blockade on this kind of activity having much impact. Too many models. Too much fun.

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?

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.

How would they know who's the original author or what the rights situation is?

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.

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.

Fable of The Scorpion and the Frog should always apply .

Uh, we're not allowed to use Claude to even mod games that fully support mods?

Based on how every time I ask it a virology question about SARS-CoV-2 and I get a refusal, I'm quite worried about how far-reaching this will be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50315987

> 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'...

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.

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.