AI Clones Games in Hours, Forcing Developers to Hide Projects Before Launch

Twenty-five-year-old Ziwen Xu, founder of the AI startup Hyperecho, has been posting daily progress updates on X while building an open-world game that bears an uncanny resemblance to Grand Theft Auto 6. All the code is written by Anthropic's Claude model, and Xu hopes his version will reach players before Rockstar's official production. It's the most spectacular example of a wider industry trend: generative AI has cut the time needed to clone someone else's idea from months to hours, and developers are starting to defend themselves by no longer showing their projects before launch.

Racing Rockstar

The idea for the GTA 6 clone grew out of a challenge posted on X by Matt Shumer, who proposed a crowdfunded game project matching the scale of Rockstar's announcements. Xu took up the challenge and began posting daily updates, sharing the code on GitHub. On the first day, the screen showed nothing more than a blue object jumping across blocks. A few days later, the AI models were already generating a human character, vehicles, street traffic, and an entire city district with streets.

The project initially ran on Claude Fable 5, before the US government blocked access to it, after which work moved to Claude Opus 4.8. Xu pays for a Claude Max 20x subscription and reportedly burned through about a third of his weekly query limit in a single day. The model also got the setting wrong, generating New York/Los Angeles-style skyscraper architecture instead of the Florida-inspired climate GTA's world is built around. Developers commenting on the project point to two real risks: astronomical token costs and possible intervention by lawyers for Take-Two Interactive, the owner of the GTA brand.

The Vanishing Prototype

The case that best illustrates why game developers are starting to hide their projects involves a much smaller production. In mid-March, developer Freya Holmér posted a short, fifty-second prototype of a game described as 'Tetris where the entire board rotates.' Within days, at least two independently created clones appeared online: Rotris by Charlie Greenman and a game called Blockfall.

Greenman admitted that building his version took 'roughly a day' and a dozen or so prompts fed to a generative AI model, which wrote the code and interface itself. He doesn't see an ethical problem with this, arguing that the line between inspiration and copying in games has always been blurry. Holmér sees it differently, and after the experience she has scaled back publicly showing work in progress.

The Cloning Industry

The phenomenon isn't new, but AI has changed its scale. The French mobile studio Voodoo, valued at $1.4 billion in 2020 and backed by $200 million from Goldman Sachs, has been criticized for years for cloning other developers' hits, including turning Donut County into Hole.io. What's new is the speed: Midnight Works, a Moldovan studio with more than 300 employees, reportedly uses generative AI 'at every stage,' according to a former employee, churning out simplified clones of popular titles under similar-sounding names.

A more drastic case hit the studio Steelkrill, whose found-footage game The Backrooms 1998 was copied almost one-to-one, down to the developers' personal VHS recordings that were left in the stolen version. Industry analysts warn that for smaller, independent studios, AI-assisted cloning is becoming one of the biggest threats on platforms like Steam, since a quickly released clone can kill the original's chances before it even launches.

What It Means for Developers

The result is a behavioral shift across the industry: more and more studios, including smaller ones, are giving up on posting work-in-progress material, concept trailers, or early-stage demos, so as not to hand competitors a ready-made recipe for a clone. This reverses a years-long practice of building a community around a game long before launch, one that used to help independent creators gain visibility.

For the Polish games market, one of Europe's largest by number of indie studios, this poses a real business risk: showing a demo at a trade fair or on social media can now end with a foreign team releasing a simplified copy before the Polish developer manages to finish their own production. Lawyers working with the games industry note that current copyright law protects specific code and artwork but not the underlying gameplay mechanic idea itself, leaving creators with few tools for defense.

You have this anxiety every time you post something, that someone will come along and finish it for you - Freya Holmér, game developer

The incentives and infrastructure today are built to encourage this kind of overproduction - Jeremy Morris, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The fate of Xu's project remains uncertain. Observers estimate that at the current rate of token spending and with the game's growing complexity, the venture could exhaust its budget within a couple of weeks, well before the official GTA 6 launches in November. Regardless of whether the clone gets finished, the attempt itself shows how far the line between inspiration and copying has shifted in an era of models that generate ready-to-use code on demand. Sources: AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever (404media.co), GTA 6 Clone (spidersweb.pl), Someone Is Building a GTA 6 Clone Using AI (autoevolution.com).