Roughly three months out from Grand Theft Auto VI’s release — and just a week ahead of an extended look premiering on Netflix — an individual or group operating under the name CyberLeek has started publishing what looks like unfinished footage from the game. The material posted so far includes driving, combat, flying and a basketball mini game, plus images that supposedly depict the title’s complete map.
In the newest clip, protagonist Jason shoots the word “Leek” into a wall, a detail that hints the leakers hold something more substantial than a folder of pilfered recordings. Beyond the videos, CyberLeek has issued a consumer-rights manifesto, minted its own cryptocurrency, and invited the public to spend that token to decide which footage drops next.
Grand Theft Auto VI is the long-awaited next chapter in Rockstar Games’ open-world crime franchise. Because Grand Theft Auto V arrived back in 2013, the fanbase has been waiting well over a decade for the sequel.
Who is CyberLeek?
CyberLeek is simply the label attached to an unidentified person or group putting out alleged GTA 6 development material. Nobody knows who is behind the name, where the operator is based, or how the footage was acquired. Whether a single individual is running everything or several people are involved also remains unclear.
The outfit styles itself as a sort of digital vigilante acting on behalf of video game consumers. Under a pixelated image of a leek kitted out in tactical gear — the vegetable — its homepage promotes “community voting,” “decentralized leeks” and “no wallet connect.”
The group has additionally put out the “CYBERLEEK Edict,” a manifesto claiming that big game publishers have degraded the industry for customers. Three rules — “commandments,” as it calls them — are laid out for publishers to observe. The document objects to digital preorders, to paid add-ons that do nothing more than unlock single-player material already sitting inside a game, and to single-player content vanishing for good once a publisher pulls the plug on its servers.
Any publisher violating one of those rules could end up a future target, CyberLeek says. In its words, the leaks will continue until its demands are met.
What the leaked footage shows
CyberLeek’s first videos surfaced on Aug. 18 and appeared to depict an unfinished build of GTA 6. One showed Jason Duval, one of the game’s two leads, taking a basketball shot. In another he drove, fought, stole a car and drew police attention. Subsequent uploads reportedly featured Jason and NPCs wielding tasers, along with a brief cut scene.
Images said to show the entire map of Leonida — the fictional, Florida-inspired state where GTA 6 is set — have also been posted. Fans have combed through the material for mechanical clues, among them possible vehicle fuel gauges, weapon-storage systems and fresh methods of shaking off the police.
One major caveat applies. Assuming the footage is real, it seems to originate from an unfinished development build — the kind of working version used while a game is still being made and tested. Anything visible there might be tweaked, polished or cut entirely before launch. The videos have also been downloaded and reposted over and over, degrading in quality with each pass, which makes them a poor guide to how the finished product will look.
Rockstar has not publicly verified any of the footage. Take-Two, the studio’s parent company, has filed copyright claims to pull down copies of the clips. While that implies the company regards the material as its copyrighted property, it is not independent proof that every CyberLeek video or assertion is genuine. Persuasive AI-generated “leaks” also make the rounds in GTA 6 fan circles on a regular basis, so the possibility that some of CyberLeek’s material has been doctored or produced with AI cannot be ruled out.
Why the newest clip changed the conversation
The latest video opens with Jason piloting a small plane above a sprawling, richly detailed stretch of the map while flipping between radio stations. What altered the picture for many fans came at the end: positioned in front of a wall, the player pumps enough rounds into it to spell out “LEEK.”
The previous leaks might plausibly have been pre-recorded videos lifted from Rockstar or one of its business partners. This one, by contrast, would require somebody steering the game live — meaning whoever captured it may be sitting on a playable build.
Misinterpretation or AI generation remain possible explanations, yet a playable build represents a far graver scenario than a finite folder of recordings. A stash of videos eventually dries up. Anyone with a playable build could go hunting for missions, cutscenes, plot twists or the ending and push them out ahead of launch.
The complaint about preorders and physical discs
Digital preorders form CyberLeek’s sharpest grievance. Preordering once made sense because retailers stocked a finite number of discs; CyberLeek’s position is that the practice stopped serving customers once the product became a digital download incapable of selling out.
“Preorders were not created for gamers,” the manifesto reads. “They were created because physical discs had manufacturing limits.”
Digital preorders for GTA 6 are open, but Rockstar is skipping a physical disc release. Shoppers can pick up a box in a store, though what is inside is a one-time download code rather than the game.
That call comes as physical games fade out across the sector. Spending on physical video games in the United States dropped to roughly $1.5 billion in 2025 — a 30-year low — as players migrated to downloads, subscriptions and cloud gaming. Present-day hardware such as the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition and Xbox Series S ships without a disc drive at all. Sony announced in July that it will halt disc production for all new PlayStation games from January 2028 onward; anything released before that date is unaffected, while later titles will be digital-only.
CyberLeek has converted that frustration into a threat. The message “NO PHYSICAL DISCS? THEN MORE LEEKS!” appears in some of the leaked videos. Digital preorders are not without upside — they let buyers pre-download a hefty game ahead of release, for instance. CyberLeek’s counterargument is that publishers should not be collecting money before a game is out or independently reviewed when digital copies can never run out of stock. “If publishers want revenue before launch, they can press discs,” the manifesto states.
Physical media accounts for only a slice of the agenda. The group is likewise against charging players to unlock single-player content that already ships inside a game’s files, which may account for its swipes at GTA 6’s $99.99 Ultimate Edition — though nothing indicates its exclusive missions and other perks are baked into every copy. It further argues that games should stay playable offline once their servers go dark, pointing to Ubisoft’s The Crew, which became unplayable in 2024. Rockstar has given no sign that this will be a concern for GTA 6.
That preservation stance intersects with Stop Killing Games, an international consumer campaign lobbying publishers and governments to keep purchased titles playable once official support ends. The campaign has disavowed CyberLeek’s methods. “Using illegal means to make a point is unacceptable to us,” it said in a statement, while also urging people not to hand CyberLeek money by buying the group’s memecoin.
The $CYBERLEEK token
CyberLeek has rolled out a Solana-based memecoin under the ticker $CYBERLEEK. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value rests largely on internet attention and speculation instead of an established product or business. The group claims the token will bankroll a secret project, technical infrastructure and defense against corporate retaliation. It maintains the token is “not a cash grab,” yet has never spelled out what the project is or where the funds end up.
The token doubles as the voting mechanism for future leaks. Participants send $CYBERLEEK to whichever option they favor, with every token counted toward that choice. Outcomes therefore measure how much cryptocurrency each option pulled in — not how many separate people cast a vote.
In one poll, users picked between a car during the day, a car at night, a motorcycle at night, or a plane during the day. The plane came out on top with more than 147,000 tokens, good for 64.4 percent of the total. CyberLeek duly published the plane footage, “LEEK” message and all. The loop is a tidy one: the GTA 6 clips drive interest in the token, and influencing the next leak requires buying and spending it.
By the afternoon of Aug. 20, $CYBERLEEK was changing hands at roughly $0.001227 apiece. Across the one billion tokens in circulation, that worked out to a potential market capitalization near $1.23 million. The same snapshot showed:
- Liquidity: approximately $198,000 — the pool of money available to support people buying and selling the token.
- Trading volume: $3.89 million.
- Concentration: the 10 largest wallets controlled 51.6 percent of the supply.
When comparatively little money underpins a much bigger paper valuation, a handful of sizable trades can swing the price hard. Certain top wallets may be trading pools or automated accounts, but the concentration still leaves a small group of wallets in a position to sway the price considerably. Volatility has already been extreme: the token spiked soon after launch before shedding much of its value, trading far beneath the all-time high it had set a single day earlier.
Impersonators and unproven links
Tracking the group is getting harder as impersonator accounts multiply. Through what it describes as its official Telegram channel, CyberLeek stated that it runs only that channel and its website. Accounts trading on the name across X, Discord, Instagram and elsewhere should not, then, be assumed legitimate.
Impersonators have already circulated purported story details and leak schedules. CyberLeek rejected one timeline making the rounds on Discord and alleged that other accounts had edited old posts to look as though they had advance knowledge of the leaks. That same Telegram statement reportedly described Arion Kurtaj — the hacker responsible for the 2022 GTA 6 leak — as “our colleague.”
No verified link exists between CyberLeek and ShinyHunters, the ransomware crew that took credit in April for accessing Rockstar data via a third-party provider. Rockstar characterized that breach as involving a small amount of unimportant company information, with no impact on its operations or its players. Until CyberLeek reveals where its footage came from — or investigators unmask the people responsible — any claim about its origin stays speculative.
Earlier leaks of this scale
The nearest precedent is the 2023 ransomware attack on Insomniac Games, developer of PlayStation’s Spider-Man titles. When Insomniac declined to pay a ransom of roughly $2 million, the Rhysida hacking group dumped 1.67 terabytes of stolen material, including a playable but unfinished build of Marvel’s Wolverine along with story details, business plans and sensitive employee data.
Wrecking a game’s biggest moments does not require the whole game, either. Footage from The Last of Us Part II hit the internet in April 2020, nearly two months ahead of release, exposing major character deaths and plot turns that people then went out of their way to spread across social media. Sony subsequently said those responsible had no affiliation with Sony or developer Naughty Dog. There is also the danger of laying bare how a game functions: German hacker Axel Gembe stole the Half-Life 2 source code in 2003, and both the code and an unfinished build of the game surfaced online pre-launch. Gembe was ultimately arrested after Valve helped draw him into contact with the FBI.
What happens next
The fanbase is split. Beneath posts about the leaks, some are thrilled to finally see seemingly real GTA 6 footage after years of delays and hype, while others beg people not to spread it and risk ruining the story. Unverified claims have spread that CyberLeek holds information on Lucia Caminos, the game’s other protagonist, and her ending; nothing currently backs those claims up. Even so, if someone is able to generate bespoke footage from a playable build, story spoilers cannot be waved away.
One more prime window for chaos is also approaching. Netflix debuts an official extended look at GTA 6 on Aug. 27 ahead of a wider rollout of the presentation. Anything CyberLeek puts out beforehand could spoil — or simply siphon attention from — whatever Rockstar and Netflix have lined up. GTA 6 is set to launch on Nov. 19.