Take-Two Subpoenas Microsoft and Discord Over the GTA 6 Leak
Take-Two stopped sending takedown notices and went to federal court instead. On 20 August, the company filed DMCA subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, demanding account data tied to the leaker known as CyberLeek. Both companies have until 4 September to comply.
We covered the leak itself on 19 August and kept it at our Reported badge, because nobody at Rockstar had confirmed anything and the takedown notices were the only signal. This post carries Confirmed, because a federal subpoena is a public court filing, not a rumor, and it is independently reported by PC Gamer, Tom's Hardware, Variety and Yahoo News with matching details.
The subpoenas ask for accounts, not just posts
A takedown removes a video. A subpoena identifies the person who posted it, and Take-Two's requests go well beyond CyberLeek's own account.
From Microsoft, the filing demands account IDs, registration and login IP addresses, phone numbers, MachineGuid and MSA device identifiers, linked Xbox and Google accounts, and OneDrive contents referencing GTA, Rockstar or Cyberleek. According to the filing, copyrighted GTA 6 material was also posted to Microsoft's GitHub developer platform, which is why Microsoft is a target and not just a hosting bystander.
From Discord, Take-Two wants identifying data for every account active in six named servers since 1 June: CYBERLEEK, CINEMATICROCKSTAR, Surfer24k, cyberleek_west, surwest and Ødyssey.gg. That is not one leaker's account. That is a membership list.
A subpoena skips the lawsuit
The legal tool here is a DMCA 512(h) subpoena, and the reason it matters is procedural: it lets a copyright holder demand identifying data from a platform without filing a full lawsuit first. Take-Two does not need to prove its case in court to get Microsoft's and Discord's cooperation. It just needs a clerk to sign off on the paperwork. A lawsuit against a named defendant, if one follows, would come after Take-Two knows who to name.
That is standard practice for rights holders chasing anonymous infringers online, not a GTA-specific escalation. What makes it notable here is the scale of what is being asked for: device-level identifiers across an entire Discord ecosystem, not a single account.
Anyone in those six servers is in scope
The detail worth sitting with, if you were anywhere near this story as a fan rather than a reporter, is the June cutoff. The subpoena does not ask Discord for CyberLeek's account alone. It asks for identifying information tied to every account active in those six servers going back to 1 June, regardless of whether that account ever posted, reposted or downloaded anything.
Server membership is not proof of wrongdoing, and a subpoena compelling data is not the same as a legal case against every name on the list. But if you joined one of those Discords to watch the drama unfold, your account details are now inside a document a federal court has already accepted. That is worth knowing before you decide whether to stick around in communities like that the next time a leak breaks.
None of this touches November 19
Nothing in the filings mentions the release date, and nothing about a leak-hunting subpoena would plausibly move it. Take-Two has reaffirmed 19 November through two straight earnings calls, most recently in its August 7 call, and this is a legal response to a leak, not a production update. If you are tracking the date rather than the drama, our countdown is still counting down to the same day it was yesterday.
The more useful takeaway is what it signals about Take-Two's posture heading into the 27 August Extended Look: the company is treating unauthorized footage as a legal problem to be solved with subpoenas and device IDs, not a marketing inconvenience to shrug off. Combined with the DMCA wave we tracked on 19 August, this is now a two-week pattern, not a one-off notice.
What happens after September 4
Compliance doesn't mean an immediate unmasking made public. Microsoft and Discord hand data to Take-Two's lawyers, not to the internet, and either company can move to quash or narrow the subpoena before that date if they think the request overreaches: asking for GitHub contents unrelated to GTA, for instance, or Discord data from accounts with no connection to the leaked material. Neither company had filed a public objection as of this post.
If a name does surface, expect it through a follow-up civil suit rather than a press release. Take-Two's public silence on the leak itself hasn't changed; the DMCA takedowns and now these subpoenas remain the only statements it has made, and both are documents rather than quotes. For background on how we're treating the underlying leak claims (including why the footage itself is reportedly years old), see our full breakdown from 19 August, and for the broader pattern of fake "leaks" this saga sits inside, our debunking guide has the history.