Xu, who founded Hyperecho, a startup that helps companies deploy AI employees, kicked off the effort this Wednesday with a short gameplay clip showing little more than a 3D blue oval moving and jumping around gray blocks.
Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out. Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this. Spent a couple hours getting the whole project structured and pushed to the repo.
He appears sincere about the push, framing the race against Rockstar's release window in blunt terms.
The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway.
The project reportedly took inspiration from a post by AI startup founder and investor Matt Shumer that Xu reposted, which floated a community-funded Fable run aimed at producing a GTA VI caliber open world.
Someone should set up a community-funded Fable run with a prompt like: '/loop until you've created a GTA-VI-caliber open-world game with a quality and scope surpassing what is shown in the initial trailers.'
The experiment centers on whether Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, described as a safer public version of the company's more advanced Mythos model, can vibe code a game at that scale. Vibe coding is a newer development approach where builders lean heavily on AI assistants to generate and debug code through natural language prompts. tech founders have embraced the method, with Jack Dorsey vibe coding at least two apps last year, while OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term has said that using AI agents is net unhelpful.
Progress moved quickly on paper. On day two, Xu shared video of a more human-looking character running through an urban landscape, though he admitted it remained far from perfect.
The agent built downtown LA skyscrapers, which is a problem, because this is supposed to be Florida. Also I've burned 33% of my 20x weekly usage in one day. So that clock is ticking.
By the latest update, the build reportedly included NPCs walking around, cars driving on roads, and weapons. Xu has continued posting daily since the original announcement, giving followers a running look at how far AI-assisted game building can go in a short window.
His self-imposed deadline still sits months away, matching Rockstar's November target unless the publisher delays Grand Theft Auto VI again.
