Take-Two Interactive, which is the parent company of Rockstar Games and publisher of "Grand Theft Auto," has laid off its 'Head of AI,' "Luke Dicken," along with an undisclosed number of employees from its AI division. The layoffs were confirmed on April 3, 2026, through a LinkedIn post by Dicken himself. This comes just two months after CEO Strauss Zelnick publicly stated that Take-Two was "actively embracing generative AI." Currently, Take-Two has declined to issue an official statement.
Dicken, who had spent over a decade at "Zynga" before being elevated to Take-Two's top AI role in early 2025, wrote with evident emotion, "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 praised his team's seven years of developing cutting-edge AI tools built specifically to power the game development, and asked the industry to consider his former colleagues for new positions.
As of now, the exact number of the layoffs remains unclear. Take-Two has not disclosed how many employees were affected. What is known is that the entire centralized AI division, which was largely built from the applied AI department that came with Take-Two's 2022 acquisition of mobile gaming giant Zynga, appears to have been shuttered or drastically reduced.
Grand Theft Auto VI has already delayed twice, from Fall 2025 to May 2026 and then again to its current November 19, 2026 release date. Analysts project it could generate over $3.2 billion in its first year alone. And yet, on the eve of that launch, Take-Two has chosen to cut the very team dedicated to exploring what AI could do for the company's games.
CEO Strauss Zelnick has not addressed the layoffs directly. What he has said, repeatedly and publicly, is that generative AI has zero involvement in GTA 6's development, and that AI cannot replace the human creativity required to build an entertainment product of that scale.
Why Did This Happen?
In the year 2022, Take-Two completed its blockbuster $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga. Zynga brought with it not just mobile gaming franchises, but an established applied AI research team that had been working on AI-driven game development tools for years. Luke Dicken was also the part of that group. When Take-Two formalized his role as Head of AI in early 2025, it seemed clear that the company was doubling down on AI as a pillar.
"Will it create hits? No. It's a bunch of data with a bunch of compute with a language model attached."
— Strauss Zelnick
However, there's a hitch, Take-Two's relationship with AI has always been complicated. It's because Strauss Zelnick has frequently spoken out of both sides on the topic of AI. On one hand, he has openly said Take-Two runs hundreds of AI pilots and implementations across its studios and, as recently as February 2026 described the company as "actively embracing generative AI." On the other hand, he has called the idea of AI producing something like GTA 6 is "laughable," and declared that "generative AI has zero part" in what Rockstar is building, and argued even that creativity is inherently human and "backward-looking AI" cannot produce hits.
The Zynga acquisition factor also looms large. Take-Two paid $12.7 billion for Zynga in 2022, but the mobile gaming giant has struggled to generate new hits under Take-Two's ownership. The AI team that came bundled with Zynga, which was the very team Dicken led, was always seen internally as a Zynga artifact rather than a Rockstar or 2K asset.
With Zynga underperforming and Take-Two under intense financial pressure, cutting a team that was arguably peripheral to Rockstar's core creative process may have seemed like a logical, if brutal, efficiency play. Meanwhile, the broader gaming industry, such as - Microsoft, Sony, EA, Riot, Ubisoft, and dozens of other studios, had already made significant cuts, with over 10,000 game industry jobs lost in 2024 alone.
What Happens Now?
The question is whether this incident signals that "Take-Two" is retreating from artificial intelligence in game development entirely, or simply restructuring it who handles it and how. Strauss Zelnick has confirmed multiple times that generative AI has no role in GTA 6's development. Rockstar Games, which operates independently within Take-Two, appears unaffected by these cuts. GTA 6 remains on track for its November 19, 2026, launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
What becomes really hard to understand is Take-Two's long-term AI strategy. The company claims to have hundreds of AI pilots and implementations running across its studios. Those individual-studio AI tools, which are used for asset creation, workflow efficiency, NPC behavior scripting, and other tasks, are not necessarily tied to Dicken's centralized team. Studios at Rockstar, 2K, and Zynga may continue experimenting with AI tools independently, even with the corporate AI division gone.
Take-Two's act comes at a moment when other publishers, including "Capcom," which recently outlined its own AI productivity policy, are literally moving in the opposite direction by expanding their AI investments. Nvidia's DLSS 5 demonstration (which drew criticism after it visibly degraded NPC quality in games) and the ongoing experiment with AI-voiced NPCs in titles like "Arc Raiders" have collectively made the industry's AI future feel less certain than it did even a year ago.
Anyways, what are your thoughts on this situation? What are your opinions on the actions of Take-Two Interactive? Let me know all your answers in the comments, where you can also provide the latest news so I can make a breakdown of it.
While we are on the topic of AI, did you know that Anthropic's Claude Code source code leaked via an npm error. The Autonomous AI Daemon was found in the Claude Code Leak. Check out for further details in my previous article.