Business Insider reported on May 5, 2026, that Take-Two Interactive's nearly 13,000 employees are "encouraged to use AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini." Strauss Zelnick told BI that AI is already handling "low-value, time-consuming tasks" and will "vastly increase efficiency and productivity." This is the same CEO who said AI making Grand Theft Auto is "laughable.", told Bloomberg that Grand Theft Auto 6 was built with "unlimited resources" and every building and street was made by hand, and called Elon Musk a simulation for claiming AI could replicate Grand Theft Auto.
Both positions are valid, and they don't necessarily contradict each other. Take-Two uses AI for everything around the game. It does not use AI for the game.
Claude is Anthropic's conversational AI model. Gemini is Google's. Both are general-purpose language models designed for tasks like summarization, drafting, analysis, and information retrieval. Neither is a game development tool. They are productivity tools, the corporate equivalent of a faster search engine that can also write your meeting notes. Zelnick framed the AI adoption this way:
Everyone understands this creates more work, not less work. When you make certain things easier, your appetite gets greater.
This is the AI paradox everyone is quietly discovering. Efficiency gains do not reduce production demands, rather they raise the bar for what is expected. If AI makes it faster to draft internal documents, the response is more documents at the same headcount, or the same number of documents at a higher quality standard, or reallocation of the time saved toward tasks that AI cannot handle.
An employee in Europe reportedly asked during an internal meeting why AI tools were not yet available in all offices. This tells you that Take-Two and its employees aren't resisting AI adoption. They are asking for more of it. The demand for AI tools is coming from within.
Zelnick's AI Statements Timeline In 2026
| Date | Venue | Statement | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
March 2026 | The Game Business interview | AI making GTA is "laughable"; "tools may help you create assets, won't help you create hits" | AI is a tool, not a creator |
April 2026 | Semafor World Economy panel | Called Musk a simulation; AI should take Musk's job first | AI replaces routine work, not creative vision |
April 28, 2026 | iicon, Las Vegas | No generative AI in GTA 6 creative development; every building built by hand | Operational vs creative line drawn explicitly |
May 4, 2026 | Bloomberg interview | "Unlimited resources" for Rockstar; development costs "gone up and up"; AI "hasn't reduced costs yet" | AI has not delivered the efficiency gains Wall Street expects |
May 5, 2026 | Business Insider profile | 13,000 employees use Claude and Gemini; AI handles "low-value" tasks; "creates more work, not less" | AI is embedded operationally across Take-Two |
The timeline shows a CEO who has said the same thing in different rooms to different audiences for three months. To the gaming press: AI cannot make GTA. To investors: AI has not reduced costs. To industry peers: AI replaces routine work, not vision. To Business Insider: AI is a productivity tool our employees use daily. None of these statements contradict each other at all.
BI reports Take-Two's stock is down roughly 11% year to date. Part of that decline came after Google released Genie 3 in January and Morgan Stanley analyst Matthew Cost warned that AI tools could "lower barriers to game creation and potentially compete with current video game producers," which contributed to a stock price drop that prompted Take-Two to issue takedowns on AI-generated GTA images. Zelnick's response to the AI threat narrative summed up the argument in a sentence:
Tools that enable us to make great assets have always been available to our competitors. Why is it that we're making hits and others are not?
AI makes it easier to make games. It does not make it easier for Rockstar to be who they are, or for others to become Rockstar. The tools do not raise the ceiling, they lower the floor. A studio with access to Claude, Gemini, and every AI tool on the market still cannot produce the seven-year, $3-billion, thousands-of-people creative process that produces a Rockstar Games title.
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In case it wasn't clear yet, Zelnick wants every adult interested in buying GTA 6 to know that the game launching on November 19 was not designed by Claude. It was not written by Gemini. The NPCs were not generated by machine learning. The streets were not procedurally assembled by an algorithm. The game was built by humans, using human judgment over seven years, at a cost no AI tool can replicate.
The company behind it uses AI to schedule meetings, draft emails, and run QA checks. It does not use AI to decide what GTA 6 is. Take-Two is not anti-AI. It is anti-AI-as-creative-director. The tools may have changed. The standard remains.