A top executive from Microsoft's gaming franchise Xbox has flagged several concerns about the use of Artificial Intelligence in the development of games. The account has now been made inactive as the posts went viral.
Brandon Stirrup, Senior Business Strategy Manager at Microsoft's Xbox division, claimed in a series of posts on X Monday that gaming studios are using AI extensively despite a "negative sentiment" about it among gamers. He claimed his revelations, against the backdrop of an industry-wide split around the need for a slowdown in AI, could potentially have him fired from Microsoft.
As of this writing, Stirrup has made his X account inactive.
What Brandon Stirrup Claimed
Stirrup revealed in his X posts that he spent the weekend developing a miniature game using AI. Despite having no experience in game development, it took him just three hours to get it done with an AI prompt.
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"Look if I’m fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know," Stirrup wrote. "You can make a game with a simple prompt, and, yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse."
{{/usCountry}}"Look if I’m fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know," Stirrup wrote. "You can make a game with a simple prompt, and, yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse."
{{/usCountry}}"Gaming is the only industry slow-walking the transition because users have negative sentiment," he wrote. “Everyone else accepts reality.”
Stirrup claims that the leaders of the gaming industry "are afraid to talk about AI." He then admits: Users want the truth. We’re using AI.”
"I love Xbox and Microsoft and I have spent 10+ years proving this," he continued in a post. “My goal is to get this over with so we can move on as a company, despite the fact that some will persecute me for this: we use AI, just as all companies do in 2026.”
Brandon Stirrup's Comments Appear In Backdrop Of Xbox Labs Launch
Brandon Stirrup's comments came just days after Xbox announced the launch of Xbox Labs, a division that will work with users and developers to make games for the AI age.
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It marked the culmination of a turn starting from a February 20 blog post by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, where she argued that Microsoft will stay away from flooding the games with “soulless AI slops.” Then in March, Haiyan Zhang, the AI general manager at Xbox, had argued that AI has been used in games for a long time but those have been different from creating what Stirrup called "custom, tailored games."
"Our games industry has been building AI systems for decades," Zhang said at a Microsoft's lecture on Responsible Innovation for Gameplay Experiences. "I'm sure you've heard of this before. From systems for pathfinding, tactical enemy behavior, cheat detection, to learning systems."
She then admitted that "what's changed today is the scale and sophistication of the model." She continued: "I think what that means is, we have to think about AI on a deeper level and I think we all are. And we have to be more mindful about how we use it."