Newshot Anthropic Reportedly Adds Restrictions to Claude: Pokémon-Related Game Assets Banned
IT之家 November 12 news — As AI is widely used to generate artwork, videos, and even video game assets, the pace of development in these technologies has outpaced the refinement of copyright restrictions. Now the gaming industry is starting to take action. The latest signs show that Anthropic, the developer of Claude, has added restrictions to its large language model that prohibit users from generating game assets using Pokémon-related intellectual property.
IT之家 notes that the discovery initially came from user reports collected by the Japanese outlet Automaton. Multiple users found that when they tried to use Claude to develop fan-made games inspired by Pokémon, Claude simply refused to help.
A user named Big Kid Nation appears to be developing an unofficial Pokémon game with the help of AI. Screenshots he shared show that when the user asked Claude to generate game assets using sprites that clearly belong to Pokémon characters, Claude refused the request.
The user then asked further whether it would change how Claude handled the request if those assets were already stored on his own computer. Claude's answer was still no, and it said it would not generate assets using any content that looks similar to Pokémon intellectual property.
Claude restricts not only characters but also music, levels, and names
X user chasm conducted a further analysis of Claude's code and appears to have identified the Pokémon-related content that the model currently explicitly restricts.
The scope of the restrictions includes music, stages and levels, character appearance, names, and the characters themselves. The earlier refusal Big Kid Nation encountered with the sprite generation request most likely triggered both the character and appearance categories of restriction.
Claude's reluctance to help users make Pokémon games with AI appears to be an extension of an earlier copyright protection update.
Previously, more and more people had begun using AI to replicate other developers' video games, and some even tried to use AI to generate similar works before the original game had officially launched. This phenomenon is gradually becoming an issue worth watching.
Anthropic had previously updated Claude to try to stop users from using the model to replicate existing video games and pass off the generated works as their own original creations. The update adopted relatively broad restrictions intended to cover the entire video game industry.
However, the earlier restrictions were mainly aimed at the wholesale replication of video game content, whereas the current refusal to generate Pokémon-related assets is the first known case of Claude explicitly restricting a specific game franchise.
It is not surprising that Anthropic chose to start taking such measures with Pokémon. On one hand, Pokémon may be one of the game franchises Claude users most frequently ask the model to imitate; on the other hand, if users were allowed to use AI to generate content containing Pokémon characters, music, and other copyrighted elements — or even to make complete unofficial Pokémon games — Anthropic could also face considerable legal risk.
Once The Pokémon Company and Nintendo decide that the situation has gone beyond an acceptable range and choose to take legal action against Claude's developer, the resulting dispute could become quite thorny.
At present, these restrictions reflect AI companies' attempts to draw copyright boundaries for generative AI. As the barrier to making game assets and complete games with AI continues to lower, how to prevent models from directly replicating existing game IP will also become an unavoidable issue for the entire gaming industry.
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