Take-Two Takes the GTA 6 Leaker to Court, Subpoenaing Microsoft and Discord to Unmask CyberLeek

The GTA 6 leak saga has reached the stage every big leak eventually reaches: a federal courthouse. On August 20, Take-Two asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to issue DMCA subpoenas to Microsoft and Discord, demanding records that could unmask whoever is behind CyberLeek, the account that has spent the summer posting gameplay from an unreleased build of Grand Theft Auto VI. Both companies have until September 4 to hand the records over.

We have deliberately not covered the leaked clips themselves, and we are not going to start now. What matters here is the scale of the response. Take-Two is not just filing takedowns anymore, it is using the strongest identification tool copyright law offers, and it is doing so three months before the biggest game launch in history.

Video: Rockstar Games on YouTube

What Take-Two is demanding

The filings are unusually broad. From Microsoft and Discord, Take-Two wants account IDs, registration email addresses, registration and login IP addresses, phone numbers, linked Xbox and Google accounts, device identifiers, and telemetry records tied to CyberLeek and a cluster of associated handles and Discord servers. The Microsoft subpoena even reaches into OneDrive, asking for GTA-related content stored on accounts connected to the leaks. The requests cover activity from June 1, 2026 onward, which lines up with when the footage first started circulating.

In a sworn declaration attached to the petition, Take-Two says the information sought is "to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers" and will only be used to protect its rights. That is standard DMCA subpoena language, but the target list is not standard at all. Going after platform records rather than individual reposts tells us the company believes it can trace the leak to a specific person, and possibly to how the build got out in the first place.

Why the timing matters

Take-Two has spent weeks playing whack-a-mole with copies of the clips, and the takedowns clearly were not enough, since the footage kept resurfacing across social platforms. The legal escalation lands at a delicate moment. The game is riding pre-orders Take-Two itself called unprecedented, the November 19 date is locked, and the company's own carefully staged reveal, the Extended Look premiering on Netflix on August 27, is only days away. Rockstar wants the conversation next week to be about what it chooses to show, not about stolen footage from a months-old build.

Our take: nobody should be surprised. This is the publisher that pursued the 2022 GTA 6 leak all the way to a conviction, and the message here is the same one it sent back then. Watch the official showing on Thursday, and let the courts deal with the rest.