Take-Two unexpectedly laid off its AI chief and his team ahead of GTA VI's release

Take-Two Interactive unexpectedly fired AI division head Luke Dicken and part of his team. The news emerged on April 3, 2026 from his own LinkedIn message — without an official announcement from the GTA VI publisher.

What Happened

Dicken wrote that his time at T2 "has come to an end" along with the work of his entire team or at least a significant portion of it. According to him, the layoff was unexpected, and he used the post not for public debate, but to help colleagues find new positions. Take-Two refused to comment. Against the backdrop of the company's scale, this story stands out not only because of Rockstar Games' prominent name, but also because in February the CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke of hundreds of pilot AI projects and implementations within the business.

"I'm very upset to report that my time at T2 — and the time of my team — has come to an end,"

Dicken wrote.

What the Team Did

Luke Dicken headed Take-Two's AI division since early 2025 after approximately ten years at Zynga, which the publisher acquired in 2022 for $12.7 billion. Indirectly, the core of this function was built around Zynga alumni. In LinkedIn, Dicken emphasizes that the team was not engaged in marketing experiments, but in applied systems for game production and did this for about seven years.

• Procedural content and generation of game elements
• Machine learning for internal game development tasks
• Tools and frontend for PCG/ML pipelines
• Infrastructure and DevOps for such systems
• Production, project management and operational processes

It's important to note that, based on Dicken's own description, this was not an attempt to automatically write scripts or replace artists with a single button. The team built an infrastructure layer: tools that speed up workflows, help with procedural generation, and make complex ML approaches suitable for daily work of producers and developers. This is why the layoff is seen not as a cosmetic reshuffle, but as a blow to accumulated internal expertise.

Why This Matters

The main paradox is that the layoff happened just two months after Zelnick's public words about "actively embracing" generative AI. At that time, he said Take-Two already saw time and cost savings from such tools, but separately clarified: generative AI plays no role whatsoever in GTA VI development. For Rockstar this is a principled position — the company's worlds, according to the CEO, are created by hand, and generative AI by its very nature "looks to the past" rather than creating truly new hits.

This creates a strange picture. On one hand, the publisher publicly supports AI and talks about large-scale internal experiments. On the other — it fires people who were precisely building applied development tools. This doesn't necessarily mean abandoning AI altogether: the company might be restructuring, moving functions to studios, or cutting central teams. But without Take-Two's comments, the market sees rather a signal of a priority shift than a calm evolution of the direction.

What This Means

For the gaming industry, this is a reminder that between loud announcements about AI and real investment in teams often lies a great distance. Even at large publishers, AI strategy can change sharply if management doesn't see quick returns or decides to move experiments closer to specific studios. Against the backdrop of preparing for GTA VI, the story looks like a cautious retreat from a centralized AI block, rather than a complete rejection of the technology.