“We have to protect our intellectual property, but more than that, we have to be mindful of others. If you create intellectual property with AI, it’s not protectable.”

What if the technology had all constraints removed on its usage? “Could we push a button tomorrow and create an equivalent to the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ marketing plan?” said Zelnick. “The answer is no. A, you can’t do that yet, and B, I am of the view that you wouldn’t end up with anything very good. You end up with something pretty derivative.”

This is primarily due to the “backward-looking” nature of AI and its processing of older information, which could be ideal for, say, disease research. However, such an approach is at odds with creating a rich narrative universe that titles like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption are known for.

“Anything that involves backward-looking data compute, it’s really good for that, and that applies to lots of things. What we do at Take-Two, anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at,” said Zelnick.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped other companies from investing in AI, especially Electronic Arts, which has allegedly pushed developers for about a year now to integrate the technology. Microsoft has also received pushback for its investment in OpenAI, though it insists there’s no mandate to use it in game development. As Halo: Campaign Evolved director Greg Hermann recently noted, “It really is about that creative spark that comes from people and improving just overall workflows.”

As for the current Grand Theft Auto, namely Grand Theft Auto 6, it’s launching on May 26th, 2026, for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Previously slated for this year, it faced a delay for more polish. Check out the latest trailer here.

“GTA 7 will be cheaper to make than GTA 6,” said Vermiej in an interview with Kiwi Talks. Vermiej, who has previously worked on previous games in the GTA franchise, went on to joke about how “We’ll have to wait for 15 years to see if we’re right or not.”

“I would imagine that…Let’s say you do a cutscene, you could just, all the characters in the cutscene could just be rendered by an AI including the conversation if you just describe the scene,” he said. “That could be your first pass of a cutscene. You’ll still have artists to do like the higher level creative stuff, and there will be glitches to fix and all that stuff, but I think the bulk of the work is probably going to be replaced.”

When asked about how this would work for programmers, Vermiej spoke about how the march of technology has also changed the role of programmers during game development. He brought up how a game engine used to be responsible for rendering visuals, and programmers had to work on other aspects of a game. These days, however, many of the things programmers used to have to work on separately have been folded into the engine itself.

“That’s already been basically happening for programmers all through the years,” he explained. “When we started GTA 3, an engine was just a rendering part, but the programmers would still write the physics and the collision detection, and, you know, animation code and all that stuff have been sort of removed from the individual projects, and it’s now part of the engine, right? Whether it’s Unity, Unreal or Rage. So there’s already tons of work that programmers used to do that’s now not being done anymore.”

“When I started, programmers were about a third of a typical team, and now it’s maybe 10, 15 percent. So, it’s already happened to programmers. And now, with AI, there’s still going to be even more work automated.”

Considering the length of time between mainline releases in the GTA series, early work on GTA 6 likely started quite some time ago. Back in May, Take-Two Interactive revealed that “earnest” development on GTA 6 only really started back in 2020. The use of the word “earnest” is likely a way to refer to the game entering full production after having wrapped up its pre-production work.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is in development for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.