Take-Two goes to federal court to unmask the GTA 6 leaker

Take-Two filed subpoenas in federal court on Thursday, August 20, 2026, seeking to identify whoever is behind the GTA 6 gameplay leaks. The filings went in at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and target Microsoft and Discord. Both have until September 4 to hand over data.

Until now the only visible response had been copyright takedowns. This is a different order of thing.

Updated August 23. Two days after this filing, the takedowns reached further than they had before: Cyberleek’s website and Telegram channel both went down on August 22, after a seventh clip. The build itself is still out there and nobody has been identified. See the leak itself for what changed.

What was filed, and why those two companies

Take-Two is using a DMCA subpoena, a mechanism that lets a copyright holder compel a platform to identify users without first filing a full lawsuit. It is fast, and it is why this arrived within two days of the leaks starting rather than months later.

• Microsoft is in scope because, according to the filing, the infringing material was first posted to GitHub, which Microsoft owns.
• Discord is in scope because the material was then posted across servers by various accounts.

Discord’s response was procedural: it said it regularly receives DMCA subpoenas, reviews them, and complies with the valid ones. Microsoft has not commented.

The scope is much wider than one person

This is the part worth understanding properly, because the headlines do not carry it.

The request is not limited to the Cyberleek account. As reported, it covers every account that communicated in three named Discord servers since June 1, and asks for:

• Windows device identifiers (MachineGuid and MSA)
• Registration and last-login IP addresses
• Phone numbers
• Linked Google and Xbox accounts
• OneDrive contents referencing GTA, Rockstar or Cyberleek

If you were in one of those servers and never touched a leaked file, your identifying data is still inside the request. Whether a platform hands all of that over is a separate question, and DMCA subpoenas are frequently narrowed or challenged. But as filed, the net is server-wide.

A subpoena was never the confirmation, and then one arrived

When these filings went in, the useful point was what they did not do. Take-Two was asserting that copyrighted material of its own had been distributed. That is a strong signal about ownership and not a statement about what the footage shows or how current it is, and for six more days Rockstar neither confirmed nor denied that the clips show GTA 6.

Updated August 27. That ended on August 26, when Rockstar described the past week as “having videos of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay leak in this way”. The footage is real, on the company’s own account of events. The distinction above still holds for everything else: the statement confirms no mechanic, no build date and no individual clip. We rate it on the leak clips being genuine and cover the statement in full on the leak itself.

The leaker was rumoured arrested, then posted again

Over the weekend, Cyberleek went roughly 24 hours without posting. That silence alone produced widespread claims that the FBI had made an arrest. There was never any confirmation from law enforcement, Rockstar or Take-Two, and no named source.

It ended the way these usually do: the account posted again. The sixth leak, a two-and-a-half minute clip showing a hypercar being taken and driven through the city, went up on August 21.

Silence is not evidence of an arrest. It is evidence of silence. Given that the same account is promoting a cryptocurrency, a quiet period followed by a dramatic return is also exactly the shape of an attention cycle.

What it did to the share price, honestly

Take-Two stock opened the week around $245 and traded near $236 on August 20. That gap has been widely reported as billions wiped off the company by the leaks.

Treat that with care. GameSpot, reporting the same numbers, points out what else was in play: chief executive Strauss Zelnick sold about $10 million of shares, and the company’s recent quarter showed a loss of more than $30 million with net bookings down 3%.

The Zelnick sale is worth being precise about, because “chief executive dumps $10 million as leaks hit” is a sentence that writes itself. Take-Two’s Form 4 filings record it as eleven separate fills on a single day, August 10, 2026, totalling 40,000 shares for about $10.1 million, at prices between $250.49 and $255.12. Two things follow from that. A round share count executed in pieces inside a five-dollar band is one order being worked through the market rather than eleven decisions. And August 10 is eight days before the leaks began, so it cannot have been a reaction to them.

A readable breakdown of those same filings is on FilingIQ (login required), which scores and parses them from the raw Form 4 data. Disclosure: FilingIQ is run by this site’s operator.

A share price is not a damage estimate for one event, and anyone presenting it as a clean measurement of leak harm is doing arithmetic the market did not do.

The week since makes the point better than we could. Reporting has the stock around $248 before the leaks spread on August 18, at an intraday low near $232, and back near $240 by August 21, ahead of the Extended Look. Those are quoted figures from financial coverage rather than our own market data, and the exact numbers move with which day and which price you pick. The shape is the part that matters: a drop that was reported as billions destroyed had recovered a good share of itself inside three trading days, while the leaks were still going. Whatever the market was pricing, it was not a permanent loss.

Nothing has moved on the release

November 19, 2026 is unchanged, and Take-Two has not revised any guidance. The Extended Look is still set for August 27, Netflix at 3 p.m. ET and free on YouTube at 9 p.m. ET, which gives Rockstar its own footage to put in front of the leaked kind.

Sources

• variety.com: Rockstar subpoenas Microsoft, Discord for data
• pcgamer.com: Take-Two kicks off the leaker hunt with subpoenas
• tomshardware.com: subpoenas for device IDs of everyone in three Discord servers
• forbes.com: the leaker is leaking again, ending rumours of being caught
• gamespot.com: Take-Two loses billions in market value since the leaks began
• finbold.com: how much Take-Two stock is down since the GTA 6 leaks
• techloy.com: the leaks hit the stock, then it bounced