Take-Two Lays Off Head of AI Luke Dicken and GTA 6 Publisher’s AI Department
Take-Two Interactive has laid off its head of AI, Luke Dicken, along with several members of the AI department. The cuts were confirmed after Dicken shared news of his departure publicly. Take-Two is the parent company of Rockstar Games, the studio making Grand Theft Auto 6.
What Happened
Luke Dicken, who held the title of head of AI at Take-Two Interactive, shared news of his departure on social media this week, signalling layoffs within the publisher’s AI team. Game Developer first reported the story, identifying multiple staffers from the department who were also let go.
Take-Two has not issued a formal statement on the scale of the cuts. The timing is notable given CEO Strauss Zelnick publicly described AI as a significant opportunity for the company as recently as late 2024 — making the decision to cut the AI team head the kind of contradiction that observers have flagged. The timing follows a broader pattern of game industry layoffs that has persisted through 2025 and into 2026, with AI departments at several major publishers being restructured or reduced.
Who Is Luke Dicken
Dicken’s LinkedIn profile identifies him as a researcher and leader focused on applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to game development pipelines. Dicken came to Take-Two from Zynga, where he worked on data and machine learning before moving into a publisher-level AI leadership role. His work at Take-Two sat at the publisher level, meaning it potentially touched multiple studios across the company’s portfolio — including Rockstar, 2K Games, and Private Division.
His departure represents a significant loss of institutional knowledge about how Take-Two was integrating AI into its development processes.
What This Means for GTA 6
The honest answer is: not much, probably. GTA 6 is in late-stage development at Rockstar, which operates with a substantial degree of independence from Take-Two’s publisher infrastructure. The AI systems built into GTA 6’s world simulation — NPC behaviour, traffic logic, dynamic world reactions — will have been built by Rockstar’s internal teams over years of development.
What Dicken’s team was working on at the publisher level is less clear. Corporate AI functions at game publishers often focus on development tooling, QA automation, and business analytics rather than in-game systems. The cuts are more likely to affect future pipeline projects than anything shipping in the near term.
That said, GTA 6 remains the most anticipated release in the industry. Any news touching Take-Two gets amplified by association.
The Broader Industry Context
Game industry AI investment built to a peak through 2023–2024, followed by a significant pullback as publishers reassessed the practical returns. Several major studios reduced or restructured AI-focused teams during this period. Take-Two’s cuts fit that pattern.
The industry-level question — whether AI tooling meaningfully accelerates game development or produces costs without proportional benefit — remains contested. Some developers have taken a firm stance: Digital Extremes recently pledged that nothing in Warframe will ever be AI-generated. Rockstar specifically has historically relied on bespoke internal systems. Whether Take-Two’s publisher-level AI team was well-integrated with Rockstar’s workflow was never clear from the outside.
