⚡ Quick Read
- Take-Two Interactive, parent of Rockstar Games, has laid off its dedicated AI team
- Head of AI Luke Dicken confirmed the news in an April 2 LinkedIn post
- Dicken joined Take-Two in early 2025 after a decade at Zynga
- The AI team had been operating for seven years across Zynga and Take-Two
- CEO Strauss Zelnick has long been skeptical of AI’s creative capabilities
- Take-Two has not released an official statement explaining the cuts
- Dicken has since launched LuDic AI, a games-focused AI consulting service
- The move bucks a wider industry trend of studios leaning further into AI tools
Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind Rockstar Games and the upcoming GTA 6, has laid off its AI team — including Luke Dicken, the company’s head of AI. Dicken confirmed the news in a LinkedIn post on April 2, making this one of the more eyebrow-raising developments in the games industry this year. While the rest of the sector has been doubling down on artificial intelligence, Take-Two appears to be moving in the opposite direction entirely.
Who Is Luke Dicken and What Did His Team Actually Do?
Dicken isn’t someone who stumbled into the AI space recently. He spent over a decade at Zynga — the mobile games giant that Take-Two acquired in 2022 for $12.7 billion — most recently serving as senior director of applied AI. When Take-Two absorbed Zynga’s operations, Dicken stepped up to become Head of AI for the entire company in early 2025, a role he held until this month. Much of Take-Two’s dedicated AI division was built on the foundations of what Zynga’s applied AI department had already established, meaning this team had genuine roots and years of institutional knowledge behind it.
In his LinkedIn post, Dicken was candid about what the team had built. “We’ve been developing cutting-edge technology to support game development now for seven years,” he wrote, adding that his colleagues had the rare ability to match “innovation and novel problem-solving approaches with strong product design chops to create systems that empower people throughout the development workflow.” He stopped short of naming how many people were affected, but the phrasing strongly suggests a significant portion — if not all — of the AI team has been let go.
Zelnick Has Never Hidden His Skepticism About AI
None of this comes entirely out of nowhere if you’ve been following CEO Strauss Zelnick’s public comments on artificial intelligence. He’s consistently been one of the more cautious voices in the industry on the topic, and not in a quiet, diplomatic way either. Earlier in 2025, Zelnick called AI creativity an “oxymoron” and stated plainly that the technology would not be used as a justification to cut jobs at Take-Two. That second part now reads a little differently in hindsight.
More recently, Zelnick leaned on a historical analogy to make his point. “Every entertainment business that was supposed to be destroyed by new technology hasn’t been,” he said. “When I was a little kid, calculators came along and parents were all up in arms that now schools would not teach kids maths because they had access to calculators. Well, people are learning maths today, even though there are calculators.” It’s a measured, almost old-fashioned view — and it stands in sharp contrast to how most of his peers in the industry are talking about AI right now.
These Layoffs Come at an Interesting Moment for Take-Two
The timing adds an extra layer of complexity to the story. Just weeks before this news broke, Zelnick told investors that Take-Two was “actively embracing generative AI” and running “hundreds of pilots and implementations” across teams. That statement now sits somewhat awkwardly alongside the decision to dismantle the dedicated team responsible for doing exactly that work. Take-Two has offered no official explanation for the cuts, leaving the industry to speculate about whether this represents a genuine strategic pivot, a cost-cutting measure, or something in between.
It’s worth noting that Take-Two is no stranger to trimming headcount when it needs to tighten the budget. Back in 2024, the company cut five percent of its global workforce and shuttered Kerbal Space Program 2 developer Intercept Games as part of a plan to save around $165 million. These latest cuts could be a continuation of that same efficiency drive rather than a direct statement about AI — but without a comment from the company, there’s no way to know for certain.
What Dicken Is Doing Next
Dicken isn’t sitting idle. He’s already announced the launch of LuDic AI, a consulting service built around “best-practice use of AI technologies for games-adjacent verticals.” Given the depth of experience he and his former team bring, it’s not hard to imagine studios lining up for that kind of guidance — especially as the industry tries to figure out where AI actually fits into game development in a sustainable, non-headline-grabbing way. He also mentioned he’ll share a more reflective post about his time at Zynga and Take-Two in the coming weeks.
Take-Two Is an Outlier in a Very Pro-AI Industry
It’s worth stepping back and noting just how unusual Take-Two’s position is right now. Krafton, Square Enix, EA, and a growing number of other major publishers have made significant investments in AI tooling — often at the cost of human roles, whether that’s translators, artists, or other creative staff. The general direction of travel across the industry has been toward more AI, not less. Take-Two cutting its dedicated AI team while GTA 6 is just months away from launch makes this one of the stranger corporate decisions in recent memory, and it’ll be fascinating to see whether Zelnick addresses it publicly in the weeks ahead.
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