Take-Two Interactive has reportedly laid off its entire AI-focused team, including its head of AI, just weeks before Grand Theft Auto VI is set to release on May 26.
The news broke when Luke Dicken, Take-Two's former head of AI, posted on LinkedIn confirming his departure alongside his team. "It's truly disappointing that I have to share with you that my time with T2 - and that of my team - has come to an end," Dicken wrote. He noted the team had been "developing cutting edge technology to support game development now for 7 years" and asked his network to help his former colleagues find new roles, citing the difficult job market.
The team behind the curtain
Dicken had been serving as Take-Two's head of AI since January 2025, having previously held a senior director of AI role at Zynga, the mobile games studio that Take-Two acquired back in 2022. His team operated at the parent company level, meaning their work was intended to support studios across the entire portfolio, including Rockstar Games and 2K Games.
Several other AI-focused staff corroborated the layoffs in separate LinkedIn posts, including Take-Two's former director of AI research, Robert Zubek, who confirmed his own departure. The exact number of people affected hasn't been officially disclosed.
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Take-Two has not issued a public statement on these layoffs. The reports are based on LinkedIn posts from affected employees, corroborated by multiple former team members.
A sharp reversal from recent statements
Here's the thing: this comes just a few months after Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told investors the company was "actively embracing AI" and described having "hundreds of pilots and implementations" across its studios. Zelnick specifically framed AI as a way to reduce costs and free up developers for more creative work.
That's a significant gap between stated strategy and what apparently just happened to the team executing it.
Zelnick's position on AI has shifted a fair bit over time. Earlier, he emphasized that the "creative genius" behind Take-Two's games was always human, and that he believed in paying developers fairly even when their work was replicated by AI tools. The layoffs suggest that whatever internal AI strategy was being built out at the corporate level has now been scaled back or redirected entirely.
What this means heading into GTA 6's launch
For players waiting on GTA 6, the practical impact of these layoffs is probably minimal in the short term. Rockstar Games had already made clear that generative AI has no part in what the studio is building, with Take-Two itself stating that Rockstar's worlds are "handcrafted." The AI team that was cut appears to have been working on broader efficiency tooling across the company, not on the game itself.
What most players miss in stories like this is the longer-term signal. The layoffs suggest Take-Two is pulling back on a centralized AI research function, which could affect how its studios approach AI-assisted development on future projects beyond GTA 6. Whether that capacity gets rebuilt inside individual studios or quietly disappears is the question worth watching.
The key here is context: the gaming industry broadly has been wrestling with how to integrate AI tools without triggering backlash from developers and players alike. Take-Two's reversal, if that's what this is, lands at a particularly sensitive moment with GTA 6 confirmed for its May 26 launch date and all eyes on Rockstar. Make sure to check out more:
