Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas can now run inside a web browser with no installation required. The work is the result of a solo developer who built an open-source engine called OpenSA that streams the game's world, vehicles, physics and lighting straight into a browser tab. The catch is how it was made: most of the code came from AI.
Let's start with what OpenSA actually is and isn't. It is not a Grand Theft Auto port and definitely not a clone. It is a from-scratch game engine compatible with RenderWare, the format the original game was built on and it distributes none of Rockstar Games' assets. To run anything, you supply your own legally owned copy of GTA: San Andreas or a compatible total-conversion mod. OpenSA is merely the engine.
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The build story is just as interesting as the actual mod itself. Serhii Aleksandrov, a full-stack web developer and former 2000s GTA modder, put the first public demo together in roughly three weeks, and by his own account leaned on Anthropic's Claude Code as a coding partner for a large majority of the work. A recent version then ripped out its original off-the-shelf graphics library for a custom WebGPU engine, pushing city scenes from a rough 16 to 24 frames per second up to a locked 120.
The resulting mod is capable of running the entirety of Los Santos with proper streaming, day-night lighting, driveable cars with damage, character controls and a pile of small touches like tire smoke, skid marks and license plates. For a solo hobby project running in a browser, that is a lot to achieve. The creator is clear that it is an experimental, educational fan project, with GTA and its trademarks belonging to Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive.
This fits a running trend we have been tracking all year of classic GTA games turning up in unexpected places, mostly because of AI, from Grand Theft Auto III on the Wii to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on a GameCube to Grand Theft Auto V on an iPhone and a developer who vibe-coded a clone of Grand Theft Auto VI but ultimately decided to pursue an entirely different project. A browser is just the latest unexpected home albeit one that has already welcomed GTA: Vice City before.
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The legal ground is the usual gray area for this scene. OpenSA ships no Rockstar code or assets and makes you bring your own game, which is the standard workaround these projects lean on to survive. However, Rockstar's new mod guidelines bar running its games on platforms where they were never officially released. A browser is squarely one of those. Where a from-scratch, asset-free engine sits against that line is a question we don't have an answer to yet and one Rockstar has not addressed.
For now, OpenSA is a genuinely impressive tech demo that says as much about how games get built as about GTA: San Andreas itself. A twenty-year-old game in a browser tab, its engine rewritten by one person and an AI in a matter of weeks. Whatever happens to this specific project, that is the part worth remembering long after GTA 6 arrives.
