Take-Two lays off its head of AI and his team ahead of GTA VI launch

Take-Two Interactive has unexpectedly laid off Luke Deaken, its head of AI, along with part of his team. The news surfaced on April 3, 2026, in his own LinkedIn post, with no official announcement from the publisher of GTA VI.

What happened

Deaken wrote that his time at T2 had "come to an end," along with the work of his whole team, or at least a significant part of it. He said the layoff was unexpected, and that he used the post not for public controversy but to help colleagues find new jobs. Take-Two declined to comment.

Given the company's size, the story stands out not only because of the high-profile Rockstar Games name, but because as recently as February CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke of hundreds of pilot AI projects and deployments inside the business.

"I am very sorry to say that my time at T2, and the time of my team, has come to an end,"

Deaken wrote.

What the team did

Luke Deaken took over Take-Two's AI group in early 2025 after roughly ten years at Zynga, which the publisher bought in 2022 for $12.7 billion. By indirect indications, the core of this function was built around Zynga alumni. On LinkedIn, Deaken stresses that the team worked not on marketing experiments but on applied systems for game production, and had done so for about seven years.

• procedural content and generation of game elements
• machine learning for internal development tasks
• tools and frontends for PCG/ML pipelines
• infrastructure and DevOps for such systems
• production, project management and operational processes

Importantly, judging by Deaken's own description, this was not an attempt to write storylines automatically 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 practical for the daily work of producers and developers. That is why the layoff reads not as a cosmetic reshuffle but as a blow to accumulated internal expertise.

Why it matters

The central paradox is that the cuts came just two months after Zelnick's public remarks about "actively embracing" generative AI. He said then that Take-Two already sees time and cost savings from such tools, but he separately stipulated that generative AI is not involved in the development of GTA VI at all. For Rockstar this is a matter of principle: according to the CEO, the studio's worlds are built by hand, and generative AI by its nature "looks backward" rather than creating genuinely new hits.

This makes for a strange picture. On one hand, the publisher publicly backs AI and talks about large-scale internal experiments. On the other, it lays off the people who were building applied tools for development. That does not necessarily mean abandoning AI altogether: the company may be restructuring, moving functions into studios or trimming central teams. But without comment from Take-Two, the market sees more a signal of reshuffled priorities than a calm evolution of the unit.

What it means

For the games industry, this is a reminder that there is often a wide gap between loud claims about AI and real investment in teams. Even large publishers can change their AI strategy abruptly if leadership sees no quick payoff or decides to hand experiments over to individual studios.

With GTA VI in preparation, the episode looks like a cautious retreat from a centralized AI unit, not a complete rejection of the technology.