Claude’s Reverse Engineering Capabilities Used To Recompile Games May Have Been Quietly Nerfed

Many have attributed the recent wave of vibe-coded decompilations and recompilations of games to Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic’s latest AI model that was released on September 22. Today, users are suddenly reporting that Opus 5.5’s ability to “reverse engineer anything” may have been stealthily nerfed. To clarify, Anthropic hasn’t announced or released a new version of Opus 5.5. However, the company has revealed a string of updates across several Claude-related products on October 21. This lines up with the recent October 21 report of Opus 5.5’s nerfed reverse-engineering capabilities on r/Claude. According to several users in the thread, prompting Claude Opus 5.5 to reverse-engineer any intellectual property will “trigger a safety guardrail mid sentence.” In one example, Claude stated that a “safety check stopped [its] response partway through” and that…

First reported by Kotaku. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.