Developers are downgrading their AI on purpose – and it's working

Anthropic's Addy Osmani confirmed on X that the company added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game, citing its IP usage policy. Developers report that Opus 5.5 is also refusing reverse-engineering and software-analysis tasks it previously handled, with some switching to older Claude models to continue paid client work. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed whether the reverse-engineering refusals are tied to the new instructions or to separate cybersecurity restrictions.