Game Changer: Anthropic clamps down on Claude’s AI video game clones

For months now, the gaming world has been reeling from a flood of unauthorised video games created using AI tools. Hobbyists and independent game developers have taken characters from one game and put them into another and made old titles available to play on platforms that were never intended by their original developers. These ‘mods’ (game-speak for creators who modify or revamp existing games) have put Spider-Man in Batman’s Gotham, Nintendo’s Mario in Elden Ring, Minecraft in Skyrim, and made famous games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City playable on a web browser.

People have decompiled and recompiled—a form of reverse engineering that involves breaking a game down to its building blocks and then rebuilding it so it can run on hardware it wasn’t intended for—in the past too, but this was a long and painstaking process, done by a small and passionate community of modders. AI coding tools have, however, cut that timeline down, and almost any fan with a few technical skills can potentially attempt to modify these games.

Anthropic has now reacted by updating Claude’s system prompt to prevent the AI tool from being used to do such moddings. It still permits the use of Claude to build original games, but recreations of existing games are now barred.

It’s no surprise that Anthropic took this step, given the potential number of lawsuits it could have faced. But given the number of constantly improving AI tools that allow you to ‘vibe-code’, whether or not Anthropic’s step will put a lid on the use of AI to create unauthorised game clones or port them is anybody’s guess.

ACCENT BIAS

A University of Washington study has revealed how AI models are biased against certain accents. The researchers tested how some AI models evaluated English spoken with five different accents. Even though the speakers read the same script and the models were told to judge only the substance of what was said, they generally ranked US and British speakers the highest, Indian speakers in the middle, and Chinese and Nigerian speakers the lowest.

AI PHONE

A startup called Cyclon recently demonstrated a phone on which users, instead of opening apps and tapping through screens, will be able to tell the phone what they want. With one touch, AI agents will execute the task, either using existing apps or building new ones if required. The first such phone, which uses a Google Pixel 8a loaded with Cyclon’s software, is available for pre-order in the US. The next iteration will become available next year.

CHATGPT UNITED

In an effort to make using ChatGPT more convenient, OpenAI is merging the Chat and Work tabs within the desktop version of its chatbot platform. Available only for select users for feedback now, it will soon see a wider roll out. OpenAI also said that users will be allowed to consume tokens from the same allowance pool after the merger. OpenAI is following a similar move made by Anthropic earlier when it merged Claude’s chat and Cowork functions.