The person behind an up-and-coming vibe-coded fan game based on the Pokémon franchise has come out against new policies by Claude owners Anthropic, restricting the genAI tool’s willingness to rip off other company’s work. Following a wave of recompilations of games, the AI developers implemented restrictions that limit its ability to work with existing IP. This, it turns out, is a problem for the guy working on the popular fan project Pokémon Arena 2D.
Big Kid Nation, the person leading the game’s development, has claimed to be spending over $2000 per month entirely on tokens to develop the project which has gone viral on social media in recent weeks. While not directly aping any of the mainline or spin-off Pokémon games, the arena battler relies on the use of extracted sprites and the IP. BKN says that he is making it because Nintendo won’t develop “the epic Pokémon game you know we all want.”
Up to $2,000 expenses a month and 10-14 hour days both learning and bulding for most of this year and last on something that will be free for everyone.
“AI slop though.”
Lol it’s gonna be so satisfying when thousands of people are playing Pokemon Arena 2D by Big Kid Nation…
— Big Kid Nation (@BigKidNation) October 9, 2026
Only now Claude doesn’t want to aid in that effort. In shared chatbot messages, the tool outright refused to help the team in continuing progress on the game. Asking whether Claude can use the Pokémon sprites on his PC to make the game, it refuses. “The sprites show Pokémon characters,” Claude responded, “so a game built from them is a game starring those characters.” Explaining that the new limitations restrict the AI’s abilities to use The Pokémon Company’s IP, it suggests the developers instead use “original fighters in the same five roles.”
— Big Kid Nation (@BigKidNation) November 11, 2026
The game, which has been in the works since February, is majority vibe-coded, with a note that the team has used “heavy AI tools” and spent “hundreds of hours of work prototyping different Pokémon mechanics, ideas and balance.”
Claiming to spend “14 hours a day” working on the game and the website to promote it, Big Kid Nation still hopes to be able to release the game in December on mobile and PC. Whereupon it will be immediately hit by a DMCA strike by The Pokémon Company for using an IP that the AI tool recommended he not use anyway.