Take‑Two cuts AI team

Take-Two Interactive, the company behind Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto VI, has reportedly cut the internal AI group it had been building for years. The clearest account came from Luke Dicken, the company’s former head of AI, who wrote on LinkedIn on April 2 that his time at Take-Two “and that of my team” had come to an end. Multiple outlets then described the move as either a broad layoff across the AI unit or the effective shutdown of the whole team. What is missing is almost as important as what is known: Take-Two has not publicly explained how many people were cut, what projects were canceled, or whether any AI work remains elsewhere inside the company. That uncertainty matters because this was not a side project. Dicken came up through Zynga, where he had worked on applied AI before Take-Two bought the mobile publisher in 2022. Reports tracing the team’s history say the group had been operating in some form for about seven years, first at Zynga and then inside the larger Take-Two structure. In his post, Dicken said the team had been building “cutting edge technology to support game development,” and people covering the layoffs pointed to work in machine learning and procedural content for games. This was the sort of internal tooling effort companies keep when they think AI will quietly make production faster. That is why the timing stands out. Take-Two is heading into the final stretch before Grand Theft Auto VI, which Rockstar says is due on May 26, 2026. The company has spent months telling investors that GTA VI will anchor a huge fiscal year. When a publisher trims a specialized technical team right before its biggest release in more than a decade, it usually means one of two things. Either the work is no longer close enough to the launch to matter, or leadership has decided that this particular AI effort is not worth funding through the finish line. The second possibility fits something Strauss Zelnick has been saying in public. In February, the Take-Two CEO drew a sharp line between AI as a production tool and AI as a creative engine. He said generative AI had “zero part” in what Rockstar was building for GTA 6 and insisted that Rockstar’s worlds are handcrafted. In the same breath, he also said generative AI tools were already creating cost and time efficiencies across the business. That was the company’s position in miniature: use AI in the pipes, not at the center of the art. Now even that narrower promise looks shakier. If Take-Two had a dedicated team working on AI systems for development support, and that team has now been cut back or disbanded, then the company is not expanding its AI capacity as the broader tech industry keeps promising to do. It may still license outside tools. Individual studios may still use off-the-shelf models. Engineers elsewhere in the company may still keep automation projects alive. But a dedicated central AI group is different. It signals ambition. Losing it signals retrenchment. There is a blunt explanation for that. The games business has spent the last two years talking about AI as a revolution while behaving like it is another line item to trim. Publishers like the idea of tools that reduce cost. They are much less patient with research teams whose payoff is hard to measure on a quarterly schedule. Take-Two’s own filings have already framed generative AI as something that may require more investment in safeguards and data handling. That is a polite way of saying the technology is not free, not simple, and not obviously ready to slot into a blockbuster pipeline without friction. So the surprising fact here is not that Take-Two uses AI. It has said that openly. The surprising fact is that, weeks before GTA VI, the company appears to have cut the people whose job was to make AI useful inside game development. The cleanest concrete detail is still the one that started the story: on April 2, Luke Dicken said his team was out.