Lawyer says anti-AI clauses now standard in game publishing deals

A games lawyer says publishers are routinely inserting no-gen-AI clauses into contracts, partly because copyright law requires human authorship to protect assets.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Publishing contracts in game development increasingly include clauses banning generative AI outright, according to a video game lawyer quoted in a report from PC Guide. The change is being driven less by ethics than by risk: lawyers argue that AI-generated assets may not qualify for copyright protection at all, leaving studios exposed if a rival simply lifts them.

The claim comes from Haley MacLean, a corporate IP lawyer at Voyer Law who works with clients from indie studios up to AA publishers. Speaking to GamesRadar+ and relayed in the PC Guide report, MacLean says “no gen AI” clauses have gone from a niche precaution to something close to boilerplate in the space of a year. “Even the smaller, more simple publishing studios are like, ‘Let’s include this just to cover our butts’,” she says. The clauses typically cover marketing, porting and QA work as well as the game itself, and MacLean says that if a publisher building its own assets does not have one, she pushes for it. Her advice to studios tempted to use generative tools regardless is blunt: “Don’t touch it. It’s not worth the legal liability that it brings to you.”

Why copyright law is the real driver here

The legal mechanism behind this is straightforward but easy to miss. Copyright protection, in most jurisdictions including the US, depends on human authorship. Content generated wholly by a machine, with no meaningful human transformation, may not be protected at all. MacLean frames this as the law simply “wants humans making art”. Using an AI-generated tree model as her example, she argues a studio has “no ownership title over them if you didn’t put in the sweat equity to have an artist go in and, inspired by that original first pass of the tree, then transform it into an original tree asset”. Gen AI, in her words, “can’t assign copyright; it can’t transfer copyright”.

The practical risk is that unprotected assets could be reused by someone else without penalty, since there is no copyright to infringe. MacLean points to Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, due in February 2027, whose Steam page already discloses that any AI-assisted assets have been replaced or “refined by humans” before shipping. She frames that disclosure as the sort of hedge studios now need, warning that developers who get “sloppy about it” and ship “a bunch of assets that are not humanly transformed into original works of IP” are storing up legal trouble. Her prediction is pointed: “I think we’re going to see lawsuits of those types in the coming years when they want their protection but they want to do everything faster and cheaper.”

Player backlash is doing some of the legal work

None of this is happening in a vacuum. PC Guide notes that gamer scepticism towards AI disclosures on Steam is well documented, and the report cites Palworld publishing lead John “Bucky” Buckley, who has said developer Pocketpair avoids generative AI simply because “gamers don’t want it”. MacLean's account suggests that commercial pressure and legal caution are now reinforcing each other: publishers wary of backlash are writing clauses that happen to also close off a copyright loophole, and once a few larger publishers adopt the language, smaller ones follow to avoid looking like the exception.

What is not clear from any of this is how these clauses are actually enforced in practice, or whether any studio has yet been on the sharp end of the lawsuit MacLean predicts. The legal theory about unprotected AI assets being freely reusable is also, by her own account, largely untested in court. For now this is a lawyer describing a pattern she is seeing across her own client list rather than a settled legal ruling, and readers weighing in on the r/gamedev discussion are already picking over how binding, or how theatrical, these clauses might turn out to be.

Sources

Image: PC Guide