Epic Games objects to an AI-made Fortnite while promoting AI tools

The line Epic is drawing

Epic has been pushing developers to use AI tools more often, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. The company wanted to finish a delayed collaboration with Disney, but employees were wary that the tools could introduce more errors.

Now Epic is objecting to AI being used to reproduce Fortnite. The tension is not simply about whether AI belongs in game development. It is about who gets to use it, and on whose intellectual property.

CEO Tim Sweeney disputed Kotaku’s account on X, saying the publication “mixes several different things.” He said Epic does not allow Fortnite intellectual property to be used without permission or compensation. He also cited a previous ruling in the Anthropic case, in which a court found that training AI on copyrighted materials itself falls under fair use. Sweeney invoked that ruling in defense of Epic’s internal use of Claude.

Others are making similar demands

Microsoft is also seeking to stop reverse-engineering projects created through natural-language programming, while continuing to promote AI across its divisions. Its subsidiary Activision has used AI-generated images in the design of recent Call of Duty games.

Documents recently made public in the ongoing New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show that Microsoft applied science director Brent Hecht privately called AI “the greatest theft of labor in history.”

Another internal document warned that generative AI could “severely disrupt the employment of the very people who created the data used to train the foundational model.”

The pattern extends beyond game publishers. AI labs have argued that they are themselves victims of copyright infringement while training models on large volumes of copyrighted material without permission.

The permission problem

I think the more revealing question is not whether these companies use AI, but where they put the boundary between acceptable use and infringement. Epic’s position distinguishes training from using its intellectual property without consent or payment; that may be a meaningful legal distinction, but it also gives the company control over which AI uses of Fortnite are permitted.

The same tension appears at Microsoft: AI is welcome as an internal tool, while projects that use it to reverse-engineer products face opposition. These companies are not just arguing over copyright. They are trying to set rules for AI use while reserving room to use the technology themselves.