Take-Two Slashes AI Team Before GTA 6, Citing Human Creativity

Three weeks before cutting his own AI department, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick sat down with The Game Business and called the idea of artificial intelligence building a game like Grand Theft Auto "laughable." Then he did something that made that position harder to parse: he fired the people whose job was to make sure it never happened anyway.

Luke Dicken, who became Take-Two's Head of AI in early 2025 after spending a decade at Zynga, announced the cuts in a LinkedIn post that has since been deleted. "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," he wrote. Dicken noted that the group had been developing cutting-edge technology to support game development for seven years, describing their work as matching innovation and problem-solving with strong product design to create systems that empower people throughout the development workflow. Take-Two declined to comment.

A significant portion of the AI division was formed from the applied AI department of Zynga, which Take-Two acquired in 2022 for $12.7 billion. That lineage made Dicken's team something of a quiet institutional backbone for AI tooling across Take-Two's sprawling portfolio of studios, which includes Rockstar Games, 2K, and Zynga itself.

The dismissals land with particular sharpness given what Zelnick has said publicly in the weeks leading up to them. Zelnick has stated that "generative AI has zero part in what Rockstar Games is building" with Grand Theft Auto 6, and that the studio's worlds are handcrafted: "building by building, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood. They're not procedurally generated, they shouldn't be. That's what makes great entertainment."

At the same time, Zelnick confirmed to investors that Take-Two is "actively embracing generative AI" with "hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company," describing AI as a tool that would "drive efficiencies, reduce costs, and create the opportunity" for creators to focus on making better entertainment. The contradiction between those two positions has been the through-line of Take-Two's AI messaging for over a year, and it's now the context in which Dicken's team exits.

The layoffs come just months before the highly anticipated release of GTA 6, a title widely considered one of the most important game launches in the industry's history. Whether the cuts signal a genuine strategic retreat from centralized AI research, or simply a consolidation of those tools directly into individual studio workflows, Take-Two has not said. What's clear is that the team Dicken built over seven years won't be there to see how it all plays out.