Anthropic quietly limits Claude Opus 5.5 reverse-engineering requests

According to an IT Home report on October 25, multiple users on Reddit's r/Claude community said that after Anthropic pushed a round of updates across several Claude products on October 21, the safety guardrails on Claude Opus 5.5 began triggering mid-response whenever they asked it to reverse engineer content protected by intellectual property. In one example cited in the thread, the model replied that a safety check had terminated the answer midway, and users added that rephrasing the request did not change the outcome. Anthropic has neither released a new version of Opus 5.5 nor published any statement about the change.

The report notes that a recent wave of game decompilation and recompilation work done through vibe-coding had been widely credited to Claude Opus 5.5, which Anthropic released on September 22, so some community members suspect that the model's ability to reverse engineer arbitrary material has quietly been scaled back. Others in the thread pushed back, arguing that Claude-assisted reverse engineering had always been inconsistent, since the classifier behind the guardrails is sensitive and success often depends on luck.

As of the report, the situation rests at the level of user reports: Anthropic has not publicly addressed the claims, and no technical details about how the interception works have been disclosed.