GTA 6 publisher Take-Two reportedly shuts down AI team as leadership shifts priorities despite earlier push for AI

GTA 6 Publisher Take-Two Interactive, the company behind Rockstar Games and the upcoming sixth installment in the Grand Theft Auto series, has quietly terminated its head of AI, along with several other employees in its AI department.

AI Team at GTA 6 Publisher Take-Two Shut Down as Leadership Shifts Direction Behind the Scenes

This news came to light when Luke Dicken, who had been spearheading AI developments in the company since January 2025 after a long career at Zynga, shared a post on LinkedIn. He said:

“It’s truly disappointing that I have to share with you that my time with Take-Two, and that of my team, has come to an end.”

Dicken proceeded to ask for help in finding new positions for his colleagues and said, “I will take the time in a week or so to make a more reflective post on my time with Zynga and Take-Two, but for right now, I would appreciate your help in finding these awesome, talented folks new positions, especially in the current climate. We’ve been developing cutting-edge technology to support game development for seven years.”

However, that’s far from the end of the story, as another former employee, Jason Leon, who worked as the senior director of AI, also posted his own farewell and discussed the reasons behind Take-Two’s new structural changes. He wrote:

“Over the past six years, first leading Zynga’s game services division in central tech, then spending the last two years building out the AI team at Take-Two, we pushed the edge of what’s possible, applying emerging technologies to real game development problems.”

Leon continued, “The chapter has come to a close, as shifting priorities from upper management have impacted my team and me.” Four other AI employees at Take-Two Interactive, along with the director of AI research and senior data scientists, confirmed on LinkedIn that they had been terminated from their positions over the past couple of days.

This feels contradictory to what Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick previously told investors. He said that the company was fully embracing AI.

Take-Two Layoffs Hit AI Division Despite CEO’s Claims of ‘Hundreds of AI Initiatives’

He previously stated, “We have hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company, including with our studios, and we are seeing opportunities to drive efficiencies and reduce costs and create the opportunity to do what digital technology has always allowed, which is that mundane tasks become easier and less relevant, which frees up our creators to do the more interesting tasks of making superb entertainment.”

However, he stressed that human creativity in game development will remain irreplaceable, especially for titles like Rockstar Games’ upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, which has “zero” generative AI. In a later interview, he even called the idea of AI like Google’s Genie 3 creating vast open worlds or games akin to GTA “laughable.”