Behind Rockstar's public statement about the Grand Theft Auto VI footage circulating online, there is a much less public legal effort — and court filings show how far it reaches.

Take-Two Interactive filed two DMCA subpoenas in the Southern District of New York on 20 August, seeking records from Microsoft and Discord to identify who has been distributing material from an unreleased build of the game.

What the Filings Ask For

The subpoena aimed at Microsoft concerns copyrighted GTA 6 material posted to GitHub, which Microsoft owns. The Discord filing targets accounts on three named servers.

The scope is the striking part. According to the filings, Take-Two is requesting MachineGuid and MSA device identifiers, registration and last-login IP addresses, phone numbers, linked Google and Xbox accounts, and OneDrive contents — for every account that communicated in those three servers since 1 June.

That is not a request limited to whoever uploaded the files. It covers people who were in the room.

Both subpoenas carry a 4 September deadline. Microsoft's Xbox division has said it is "working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games to support efforts to protect creative works and intellectual property." Discord has not publicly commented.

What This Does and Doesn't Mean

Worth being precise here, because this is the kind of story that gets overstated.

A DMCA subpoena is a request for records, not a lawsuit and not a finding of wrongdoing. Nothing has been decided by a judge on the merits, no individual has been named publicly, and no charges exist. The recipients can comply, negotiate the scope, or challenge it.

What it does tell you is that Take-Two has escalated. Through most of August the visible response was takedown notices aimed at individual posts and accounts. Subpoenas seeking device-level identifiers are a different order of effort — the goal is attribution, not cleanup.

It also puts Rockstar's statement in context. The company spent that message talking about how the situation felt for its developers and asking fans to wait for launch. The legal track was already running well before that.

The Wider Picture

Rockstar has confirmed *Grand Theft Auto VI* is still launching on 19 November for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the official gameplay showcase arrives on 27 August. Neither has been affected by any of this.

For the site's position on unverified material and how to tell genuine footage from fakes, see our guide on how to spot fake GTA 6 footage.