I’m posting this as someone who is, on paper, about as inside the tent as a small customer gets. I run Conflict Simulations LLC, a small board game publisher. Anthropic accepted my company into Claude for Startups in October. I’m an early access trusted tester. I pay for Claude on multiple accounts and my whole business runs on Claude Code. My paid work is building personalized digital modules of board wargames for individual clients, from games they own, for their own use. Original code, written from materials the clients supply. A lot of it exists so older players, and players whose physical or social circumstances keep them from playing in person, can still play. This is not piracy, and it is not close to piracy. This week a new server-delivered instruction in Claude Code (reported publicly under the flag name “tengu_heron_brook”) began refusing that work outright: no recreations of specific existing games, even renamed. The part that still gets me: my sessions kept doing the work fine after the rule reportedly shipped, until I saw the rule discussed on Twitter and asked Claude to check whether it affected us. From that moment, refusal. I cleared the session; sessions working from the same repositories still refuse. The system did not think my work was a violation until I asked it to audit itself. Support, from both of my accounts, was the Fin bot: the policy “applies to all customers without exception,” and no exemption or verification path exists for professionals. Both tickets eventually reached humans; one is now with a “specialist team” with no timeline given. I have filed a Safeguards appeal, emailed the one Anthropic PM I actually know, sent /feedback (that one was less polite), and opened a public issue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/106167 Meanwhile the work still has to get done, so as of this morning my agent stack is running on Kimi, with Codex as fallback. I do not love that. I would rather be here. But Anthropic has effectively made the decision for me, and I suspect I am not the only developer being pushed toward Chinese models this week by a rule that cannot tell the difference between piracy and legitimate work. I keep coming back to the same thought: this is partly on me for placing real trust in an AI company. I built my business on Claude because it was the best tool, and because Anthropic seemed like the adults in the room. Right now it feels like a stab in the back. Has anyone else been hit by this rule, on games or anything adjacent? And has anyone, anywhere, gotten an actual statement from Anthropic about what changed? Because so far, from where I sit, there is not one. edit: want to say thank you to everyone who replied thoughtfully here. this morning has been pretty nerve-wracking and the helpful replies genuinely helped. update on my end: I’ve managed to get my tools working with different models now, so I’m not dependent on any one model anymore, which honestly I should have done a while ago. later when things calm down I’m going to carefully try scrubbing the git history and the claude memories that have the refusal baked into them and see if that un-poisons things. still hoping anthropic says something either way, a statement would beat silence. but either way, thank you one correction, I stated this incorrectly earlier: my whole business doesn’t run on claude code. conflict simulations is a board game publisher first, that’s the bulk of it and it’s fine. this hit the module work specifically, which is a real part of my income and the part that got shut off overnight. submitted by /u/lerugray
Originally posted by u/lerugray on r/ClaudeCode