The Grand Theft Auto 6 information drought continues to fuel the most predictable content cycle in gaming: Rockstar Games says nothing, fans get desperate, and someone fills the void with something fake. The only change is that Grand Theft Auto fans are getting wise enough not to believe anything that isn't from Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive.
A clip supposedly showing leaked Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay started circulating on X over the weekend, racking up hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of hours. The footage appears to show a pause menu, some in-game UI elements, and what the creator presumably wants you to believe is a development build of the most anticipated game on the planet. The problem is that it falls apart the moment you actually take a close look at it.
The menu screen features what are very clearly AI-generated images. There are visible spelling errors baked into the visuals, the kind of prompt remnants you get when someone doesn't clean up after their image generation tool. That alone should be enough to dismiss it outright, but even if you overlook that, there's a more technical tell: Rockstar's actual development builds have always featured a black bar running along the bottom of the screen. This clip doesn't have one. Anyone who paid attention to the 2022 leak - the real one - knows what authentic Rockstar dev footage looks like. This isn't it.
Then there's the design itself. The pause menu in this clip looks like something out of 2005. It's flat, generic, and completely out of step with the UI design Rockstar has used in Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, both of which featured polished, stylized interfaces that matched the tone of the game. Whatever this menu is, it doesn't look like something a studio spending upwards of a decade and billions of dollars on a single game would ship, or even prototype in 2026.
