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On August 18, an unidentified person or group going by the name “Cyberleek” began sharing what appeared to be Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay clips on the internet.
The internet was naturally skeptical, but the footage was hard to fault: It looked authentic, showing mundane GTA 6 gameplay featuring its male protagonist, Jason. In one clip the player shot a basketball outside of the same house we’ve seen in the trailers, and in another he did some typical GTA random-civilian-murdering.
A day later, Cyberleek dropped two more videos, both of which also looked legit. At the same time, the clips were being stricken from social media on copyright grounds—the only public response from Take-Two and Rockstar so far.
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The fifth video Cyberleek released ended with a twist: the player writing the word “LEEK” into the side of a building with bullet holes. These are not, it turns out, clips taken by GTA 6 testers and found on an unsecured server, as many assumed. Cyberleek has (or had) access to a build of GTA 6, or a portion of it.
Here’s what we know about the leaker who goes by Cyberleek.
The GTA 6 build they are using may not be complete, but is probably recent
We don’t know exactly how Cyberleek is getting their clips. The footage of them shooting “LEEK” into a wall indicates they have or had access to a playable build, but it is not necessarily the full game. It’s notable that GTA 6’s other protagonist, Lucia, has not shown up in the clips.
It does seem that these clips are from a relatively recent build, however. In one of the clips, the in-game radio is playing “Sports Car” by Tate McRae, which released in January 2025.
They’ve got a manifesto
Cyberleek has made common consumer rights complaints their justification for the leaks: “Publishers sell licenses and call them purchases. They ship unfinished games and call them living services. They lock content on discs and call it DLC. They kill games and keep the money. Every year anti-consumerism tightens its grip, and every year gamers get less for what they pay.”
Their demands for game publishers are a little odd
At a glance, Cyberleek’s complaints seem typical, but two of the three demands they’ve put forward strike me as slightly strange choices.
The demands are: no more digital preorders, no more selling DLC already contained in the base game files, and mandatory “offline fallback states” for the singleplayer components of games.
The third demand is the most expected, and is similar though not identical to the demand of the Stop Killing Games movement (which has disavowed the leaker).
The other two, however, don’t seem like the kind of core issues most people would choose if they were putting forward their three biggest gripes about the games industry in 2026.
On-disc DLC—where add-on content is included in the base game’s files, but inaccessible without paying extra—was a big controversy around 10-15 years ago, but is much less relevant in today’s mostly discless world.
The complaint that preorders don’t really mean anything when you’re not preordering an actual physical disc is also valid, but seems like a roundabout way to complain about the heart of the issue: The end of physical media, which has been a hot button topic following Sony’s announcement that it will cease disc production.
I’m not sure you can rally a movement behind ending digital preorder bonuses and preloading: GTA 6 itself has already enjoyed an “unprecedented” number of preorders. You can definitely rally a movement behind seeing more GTA 6 leaks, though.
They’re selling a crypto token
The leaker is promoting the $Cyberleek token alongside the leaks—the market cap is $1.1M at the time of writing—and claims that the funds will go toward “a secret project.”
For now, the tokens are being used to vote in polls that determine the next clip to be released. The most recent clip, a flyover of Vice City, was the winner of a vote.
The timing of the leaks could suggest a European origin
The leaks have been dropping at around 9 am my time, in California, except for the most recent one which was posted in the vicinity of 2:30 am Pacific.
There’s a good chance that Cyberleek does not keep a typical sleep schedule, so this speculation is a bit tenuous, but the timing could point to Europe. For someone nine hours ahead of me, the leaks would be dropping late morning or late afternoon, which seem like respectable hours for leaking videogame footage.
The reference to “living service” games in the manifesto may also point to someone who speaks English as a second language or is using machine translation, unless it was just a creative turn of phrase.
Some are pointing to old posts on a German cybersecurity forum
2018 posts from the user “Cyberleek” on German-language forum szenebox.org, which includes cybersecurity-related boards, as well as other archived internet evidence, suggest that the leaker could be a German or Swiss individual in their 30s. A detailed breakdown of that evidence can be found on this Github page created by software developer Zyre.
The leaker’s website and two of its mirrors are also hosted by a German provider.
A little more speculation
Based on the above, I would wager that Cyberleek is not a Rockstar employee or contractor, and that their manifesto was written after they acquired the GTA 6 build or footage as a post-facto justification and framework for the $Cyberleek token.
The complaint about on-disc DLC sticks out to me as a suggestion that this isn’t a teenager, but someone who was active in gaming discourse a decade ago.
Cyberleek could face serious repercussions if caught. The hacker responsible for the massive 2022 data dump that first revealed GTA 6 to the world certainly has, and the crypto token adds another vector by which authorities may track Cyberleek down.
That fact hasn’t slowed them down: So far they’ve released five videos, and while fans are obviously excited to pore over the gameplay details, there’s some concern that the leaker will resort to posting story spoilers if attention wanes.
Rockstar’s official GTA 6 gameplay reveal is still scheduled for Thursday, August 27.
