Pokémon Fan Who Spent Thousands of Dollars on AI Tools Upset as Anthropic Finally Begins Crackdown

A Pokémon fan who claimed to be spending thousands of dollars each month building a vibe-coded AI project is now complaining after Claude AI maker Anthropic finally introduced copyright limitations.

Claude models are now "starting to refuse" to work on projects that include official Pokémon assets, according to Pocket Monster fan Big Kid Nation. In a post on X/Twitter last night, Big Kid Nation went on to lament the fact that no money had ever been made on the project despite significant investment, unlike other similar projects that are being funded through Patreon.

"Anthropic has cracked down and Claude models are starting to refuse work on Pokémon fan projects," Big Kid Nation wrote, attaching a screenshot in which Claude stated it could no longer generate code designed to work with images it detected as featuring official Pokémon designs.

"All that money spent, never took a cent (unlike many others with itch.io, Patreon etc.)," Big Kid Nation continued. "Nintendo. Just make the epic Pokémon game you know we all want. I'll live on the street and work for free if it helps."

Big Kid Nation is currently building "Pokémon Arena 2D," a game that has somehow escaped the beady eyes of The Pokémon Company's lawyers up to this point, but seems unlikely to do so for much longer. "Real-time arena battles in pixel art," reads a description listed on BigKidNation.com. "Two years in the making, and free to play."

In another X/Twitter post made earlier this month, Big Kid Nation claimed they were racking up as much as "$2,000 expenses a month and 10-14 hour days both learning and building for most of this year and last." And while the game was coded using AI tools, Big Kid Nation was keen to push back on those branding it simply as "AI slop."

Big Kid Nation said that they set their PC running overnight simulating battles within Pokémon Arena 2D to try and detect balance issues, and then spent 14 hours a day sitting at the computer itself.

"Vibe coding games is so fun," Big Kid Nation wrote in another post, made last month. "There are some negatives with unethical vibe coders. But you're creative and love game development it's just a dream. What took me a year to make people can make in a week. And some can't make anything original. But those with ideas it's just one thing after another."

As an example of another "original vibe coded project", Big Kid Nation pointed to the separately-developed Poké Derby, which appears to be a Pokémon-themed version of the hugely popular Japanese racehorse game Umamusume. "This is what I'm talking about," Big Kid Nation wrote. "Instead of seeing ideas and just taking them with no creativity, these guys just build their own unique world from scratch."

Numerous comments on this post pointed out the fact this was in fact a Pokémon-themed version of Umamusume, seemingly to no avail.

The next official Pokémon games to release remain Pokémon Winds and Waves, which will arrive exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2 next year. Maybe it's best to just wait for those?