Epic Games is betting the future of one of its most important projects on artificial intelligence doing the work. According to a Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier published Monday, 12 October 2026, the Fortnite maker has delayed its unannounced Disney collaboration — a shooter built around Marvel and Star Wars characters — and ordered the team to rebuild it as an "AI first" production, with Anthropic's Claude writing the code and AI workflows generating the art.
The game had been targeting a March 2027 release. Bloomberg reports that no replacement date has been communicated to the team. In an internal message seen by Bloomberg, one of the project's directors told staff there would be "no more hand-written code" and that all artwork would be produced through "full AI workflows", with human developers managing and guiding AI-generated assets rather than creating them directly. Hours after the report, Epic chief executive Tim Sweeney appeared to confirm a company-wide shift, posting on social media that "we have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration".
The Bloomberg report: "no more hand-written code"
Schreier's reporting, based on internal messages and people familiar with the project, describes the most aggressive AI production experiment any major game studio has attempted. Developers on the Disney shooter were instructed to use AI tools — with Anthropic's Claude named as the mandated model — to generate code and artwork, while humans supervised, reviewed and directed the output. The pivot was announced to the team on a video call in early October, and it reportedly left many developers stunned.
The reaction inside the studio was not one of quiet compliance. Bloomberg reports that staff responded with internal jokes imagining workers having to ask Claude to fix errors the model itself had introduced, and that several developers openly questioned how the team would handle AI-generated mistakes — and whether the new approach would deliver the results Epic expects. That scepticism is telling: the people being asked to bet a flagship Disney collaboration on AI-first production are the ones who know best how often generated code and art goes wrong.
Epic's communications director Jake Jones confirmed the direction to Bloomberg, saying the company is "embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do". Disney did not immediately respond to Bloomberg's request for comment, and Anthropic has not commented on its role as the mandated model provider.
Sweeney confirms the pivot — and reframes it
Tim Sweeney did not dispute the report. In his social media post on Monday evening, he framed the change as bigger than one delayed game — a strategic redirection across the company. His key claim: the aim is not to do the same work with fewer people, but "to enable everyone here to build more and better stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal".
That framing matters because of what happened earlier this year. Epic cut 1,000 jobs in March amid declining Fortnite engagement, and multiple reports tie the Disney project's delays to understaffing and underestimated schedule needs. Sweeney's insistence that the pivot is about acceleration rather than headcount reduction reads, at least in part, as an answer to the obvious question: is "AI first" a production philosophy, or a staffing philosophy wearing a trench coat?
The honest answer is probably both. AI-first production promises faster iteration — prototypes in days instead of months, art exploration at machine speed. But when a studio that just laid off a thousand people tells its remaining developers that code will no longer be written by hand, the workforce implications are impossible to ignore, whatever the CEO's framing.
Why the Disney project fell behind
The context for the pivot is a project in trouble. The US$1.5 billion collaboration between Epic and Disney, announced in early 2024 with Disney taking an equity stake, was framed as the beginning of an "entertainment universe" — a persistent world blending Fortnite's social scale with Disney's characters and stories. The Marvel- and Star Wars-themed extraction shooter was meant to be the first of multiple joint games.
Two and a half years later, the shooter has no public title, no announced date, and now no release window at all. Bloomberg's reporting attributes the slippage to Epic underestimating the time and resources the project needed, compounded by the March layoffs. An understaffed team building an ambitious multiplayer shooter on an aggressive timeline is a familiar recipe for delay in this industry; what is unfamiliar is the proposed remedy.
There is a logic to it, at least on paper. If the bottleneck is staffing and the timeline is broken, AI acceleration offers a way to multiply the output of the developers who remain. The gamble is whether AI-generated code and art can meet the quality bar of a Disney-branded flagship — a product that will be judged not against AI demos but against the most polished games on the market, carrying characters worth billions.
Nobody else has tried this
AI is already woven through game development: procedural generation, AI-assisted coding, concept art iteration, automated testing. But as industry observers noted in response to the Bloomberg report, no other major games company has attempted to build a game mostly with AI. The distinction between AI-assisted and AI-first production is the whole story here.
AI-assisted development keeps humans as the authors and AI as the tool — autocomplete for code, reference boards for art, automation for drudgery. AI-first production inverts the relationship: the model produces, the human reviews. That inversion raises practical questions the industry has not answered at scale. Who is accountable when AI-generated code ships a game-breaking bug? How does a studio maintain a coherent art direction when assets are generated rather than drawn? What happens to the institutional knowledge of a craft when the craft itself is delegated?
The extraction shooter genre makes the experiment even bolder. These are systems-heavy games — persistent progression, complex economies, anti-cheat, live operations — where subtle bugs compound over months of play. It is one thing to generate a prototype with AI; it is another to maintain a live service built on generated systems. Epic's own developers, joking about asking Claude to fix Claude's errors, have put their finger on the central risk: debugging code you did not write, generated by a model that cannot fully explain its choices.
Why it matters: jobs, quality and the Unreal ecosystem
Sweeney's post explicitly tied the pivot to Unreal Engine — the benefits, he said, would flow to "all teams using Unreal". That is the strategic tell. Epic is not just a game developer; it is the company behind the engine that powers a significant share of the industry. An AI-first production pipeline proven inside Epic becomes a template — and eventually a product — sold to every studio on Unreal. If the experiment works, Epic owns the workflow of the future. If it fails publicly on a Disney flagship, the reputational damage extends to the engine business too.
For the industry's workforce, the signal is stark. Game development has endured waves of layoffs in recent years, and the March cuts at Epic were among the most prominent. A public commitment to "no more hand-written code" at one of the industry's most influential companies will accelerate the anxiety — and the adoption — across every studio watching. The developers' scepticism inside Epic is likely mirrored in Slack channels across the industry today.
For players, the verdict will be simpler and slower: is the game any good? The Disney shooter has no date, and AI-first production has no track record at this scale. The industry's most-watched experiment now has the industry's most recognisable characters riding on it. Whatever emerges — a triumph of acceleration or a cautionary tale — every major studio will be studying the result.
FAQs
What is Epic's "AI first" plan?
According to Bloomberg's reporting, Epic Games has ordered the team building its unannounced Disney collaboration shooter to adopt an "AI first" production model: developers must use AI tools, with Anthropic's Claude as the mandated model, to generate the game's code and artwork, while humans manage, review and guide the AI-produced assets. An internal message from one of the project's directors reportedly told staff there would be "no more hand-written code" and that art would be created through "full AI workflows". CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed a company-wide pivot toward what he called "maximum AI acceleration".
What is the Disney game, and when was it supposed to come out?
The game is an unannounced extraction shooter featuring Marvel and Star Wars characters, the first title in the collaboration Epic and Disney announced in early 2024, when Disney invested US$1.5 billion in Epic and took an equity stake. The project had been targeting a March 2027 release. Bloomberg reports it has now been delayed indefinitely, with no replacement date communicated to the team, amid slower-than-expected development that Epic attributes to understaffing and underestimated scheduling.
Has any other major studio tried building a game mostly with AI?
No. AI tools are already common in game development — for code assistance, concept art, procedural generation and testing — but industry observers note that no other major games company has attempted AI-first production, where AI generates the code and art and humans supervise. That is what makes Epic's move unprecedented: it inverts the usual relationship, making the model the producer and the human the reviewer, at the scale of a flagship Disney-branded title.
Why are Epic's developers sceptical?
Bloomberg reports the pivot surprised the team on an early-October video call, prompting internal jokes about having to ask Claude to fix errors it had introduced itself. The scepticism has substance: AI-generated code can contain subtle bugs that are hard to detect and harder to debug when you did not write it, and maintaining a coherent art direction across generated assets is an unsolved problem. Extraction shooters are systems-heavy live-service games where small defects compound over months of play — a demanding test bed for an unproven production model.
What does this mean for jobs in game development?
Epic cut 1,000 jobs in March 2026 amid declining Fortnite engagement, and Sweeney has insisted the AI pivot is about enabling developers to "build more and better stuff" rather than doing the same work with fewer people. But the combination of large layoffs and a public "no more hand-written code" directive is fuelling industry-wide anxiety about AI-driven displacement. Sweeney also tied the pivot to Unreal Engine, suggesting the AI-first pipeline could become a template for the many studios using Epic's engine — which would extend the experiment's influence far beyond one game.
🤖 This article was rewritten by Feed and Figures' editorial AI from a report originally published by Ars Technica. Facts and quotes are preserved from the original; the rewrite focuses on clarity and structure. For the unedited original, see the source link below.
