The head of Take-Two Interactive‘s AI team has seemingly been laid off, along with an undisclosed number of other employees working on leveraging AI at the company that owns Rockstar Games, 2K, and Zynga. The reorg comes despite CEO Strauss Zelnick saying the parent-publisher is “actively embracing generative AI.”
“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,” Luke Dicken, who became Take-Two’s head of AI in early 2025 after a decade at Zynga, wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday. He added, “We’ve been developing cutting edge technology to support game development now for 7 years. These folks know how to match innovation and novel problem solving approaches with strong product design chops to create systems that empower people throughout the development workflow.”
Much of Take-Two’s AI team appears to have been established out of Zynga’s existing applied AI department. Take-Two acquired the mobile gaming company in 2022 for $12.7 billion but the partnership has struggled to generate new hits. Many industry colleagues of Dicken’s shared their shock at the news of the layoffs.
Take-Two declined to comment.
Last month, the company tried to distance itself from tools like Google’s Genie after its stock price took a hit from investors concerned that generative AI would allow anyone to make world class games without massive development teams. “Genie is early in its iteration at this point and trying to make a comparison to a game engine is just really—they’re not even in the same ballpark. Genie is not a game engine,” Take-Two president Karl Slatoff said at the time.
While CEO Straus Zelnick has repeatedly poured cold water on the idea that genAI could make the next Grand Theft Auto, he recently confirmed the company is all in on exploring how to incorporate the technology into game development. “As it happens now, we’re actively embracing generative AI, he said during a recent investor call. “We have hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company, including with our studios, and we are seeing opportunities to drive efficiencies, reduce costs, and create the opportunity to do what digital technology has always allowed, which is, mundane tasks become easier and less relevant, which frees up our creators to do the more interesting tasks of making superb entertainment.”
But the industry’s embrace of AI has also sparked a backlash among players. Nvidia took a big hit in March when it revealed how its upcoming DLSS 5 graphics tech would slopify NPCs in popular games. Even Arc Raiders, which sold millions of copies and won critical acclaim despite NPCs voiced by genAI, recently started replacing those artificial voices with real human recordings.
