IT Home On October 25, many people attribute the recent wave of game decompilation and recompilation trends driven by “vibe-coding” to the latest Claude Opus 5.5 model released by Anthropic on September 22. Now, a large number of users suddenly report that the ability of Opus 5.5 to “reverse everything” may have been quietly weakened.
First to note: Anthropic has not officially announced or released a new version of Opus 5.5. However, on October 21, the company released a series of updates for several Claude-related products. This time point coincides with a post that appeared on Reddit r/Claude on October 21, which stated that the reverse engineering capabilities of Opus 5.5 were restricted.
Multiple users reported in the post that when instructing Claude Opus 5.5 to reverse-engineer any content protected by intellectual property rights, the security guardrail triggers an interception mid-output. In one example, Claude replied that “the security verification terminated the response,” and no matter how the wording is changed, no further analysis can be generated.
However, some users in the post have different opinions. Some people say that using Claude for reverse engineering is inherently unstable; “the classifier itself is very sensitive, and whether it succeeds depends entirely on luck.” However, users who hold this view are a minority.
Will Anthropic modify the model capabilities without updating the patch description? The answer is: yes. This company often does so, so there is a fairly high chance that the reverse-related capabilities of Opus 5.5 have been silently adjusted without informing users.
As for why Anthropic actively reduced the model’s capabilities, it is not difficult to infer. IT Home noticed that on the X platform, users linked this change to an event: someone used Claude to modify the firmware of Samsung TVs’ built-in microphones. This may not have been the last straw, but a series of events — such as using Claude to port games to browsers, and commercial programs like Adobe and Microsoft Office being used with open-source models — likely influenced Anthropic’s decision-making.