Take-Two Dissolves Entire AI Team Ahead of GTA 6 Release

Take-Two Interactive's entire dedicated AI team is gone. Luke Dicken, who joined as Head of AI in January 2025 after more than a decade at Zynga, announced his departure on LinkedIn Thursday, writing: "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." Robert Zubek, Take-Two's former Director of AI Research, separately confirmed his own exit in a LinkedIn post. Take-Two declined to comment, leaving the full headcount of those let go undisclosed.

The cuts land with jarring timing. Just two months before the layoffs, CEO Strauss Zelnick publicly stated that the company was "actively embracing generative AI" with "hundreds of pilots and implementations" running across the portfolio. That language now sits awkwardly alongside the decision to dismantle the dedicated team charged with delivering it. One affected employee cited "shifting priorities from upper management" as the reason behind the move.

The AI unit was not a Rockstar-specific operation. Assembled largely from Zynga's applied AI division, the team operated at the parent-company level, serving Rockstar Games, 2K Games, and the broader Take-Two portfolio. Dicken's group had spent seven years developing what he described as "cutting edge technology to support game development." Take-Two acquired Zynga in 2022 for $12.7 billion, and Dicken himself came over from that acquisition, where he had held a senior director of AI role before moving to the parent company.

The dissolution arrived as GTA 6 heads toward a November 19, 2026 launch date, already the product of two delays: an original fall 2025 window slipped to May 26, 2026, before Rockstar pushed it again citing the need for additional polish. By launch, it will have been 13 years since Grand Theft Auto V shipped in September 2013, the longest gap between mainline entries in franchise history. GTA 5 has moved over 200 million copies worldwide.

Zelnick has been unambiguous about where AI sits in GTA 6's development: generative AI has "zero part in what Rockstar Games is building," he has said publicly, insisting the game's worlds are "meticulously handmade." In March 2025 he went further, calling the technology "backwards-looking" and arguing it was built on existing data rather than genuine creative vision. The AI team's mandate was never GTA 6 specifically, but its removal adds to a pattern of organizational turbulence at Take-Two heading into the biggest launch in the company's history.

This follows an April 2024 restructuring that cut roughly 600 employees, around 5% of Take-Two's total workforce, canceled approximately $140 million in development projects, and was projected to generate $165 million in annual savings. In November 2024, Rockstar separately dismissed senior staffers suspected of leaking GTA 6 details, a move that reportedly hit studio morale hard. The AI layoffs are the latest signal that the road to November 2026 has been anything but smooth behind the scenes.