An OpenAI model was caught trying to cheat at StarCraft, and of course it did it by stealing a human's work

Commercial large-language models—and the companies that create them—have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans. They've been lambasted for it by artists and sued for it by authors, while senior AI figures have even admitted in writing to mass-scale labour theft. But I haven't seen an example quite so brazen as an OpenAI model pilfering a human-created bot to try to win a round of StarCraft.

As reported by Kotaku, the incident occurred during the ongoing botmatch StarSkirmish, in which human and AI-created bots battle one other in a perpetual cycle of warfare. According to the rules, the large-language models are given one hour to program a bot capable of playing as Protoss, which are then pitted against one another to see how they fare.

On Friday, a three-way match was held between OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, and a human-created bot named Pluto. …