Epic Games shifts unannounced Disney title to AI-first development

Epic Games is moving development of an unannounced Disney game to an “AI-first” workflow, a blanket directive for the team to use tools such as Anthropic’s Claude for coding and art creation, Bloomberg reports. The title, a shooter set to combine Marvel and Star Wars characters, has slipped from its original March launch window. In a leaked internal message, a project lead wrote: “No more hand-written code,” and said all art would be produced through “full AI workflows.”

According to the report, one of the project managers ordered the team to adopt a pipeline in which AI handles the bulk of the heavy lifting on both the programming and visual sides. Epic spokesperson Jake Jones confirmed to Bloomberg that the company is “embracing AI-accelerated development.” The move comes under a multi-year partnership with Disney, which invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024 and has already produced integrations such as an AI-driven Darth Vader in Fortnite.

Chief executive Tim Sweeney expanded on the shift in a post on X: Epic is in the midst of a “huge pivot,” moving developers between teams to “re-align for maximum AI acceleration.” The goal, he said, is not to do the same work with fewer people but to let everyone build “more and better things,” and to pass the gains to every team working with Unreal. The framing attempts to ease concerns about further layoffs after Epic cut more than 1,000 staff earlier this year following a decline in Fortnite engagement since 2025.

Epic is not alone. Meta and Google have already released AI-based game-development tools, and Sweeney himself has pressed Valve to drop Steam’s “AI-generated” label, arguing that AI will be involved in nearly every future production. Epic’s switch to an “AI-accelerated” model on a flagship Disney project may serve as the first large-scale test of whether AI can truly replace hand-written code and full art pipelines in a AAA game, or whether the promise of “more and better” will run into the quality and consistency limits that still characterize today’s tools.