Developer claims Google AI revealed details about their game’s upcoming content.
Video game developers, regardless of their size, face a myriad of challenges, from mass refunds on short titles to two developers launching games with identical names in the same week. Now, they have to contend with a new threat: AI scraping private documents and leaking confidential details about their projects.
This was the case for Klub Kofta Studio, a solo developer behind the tower defense game Operation Octo, which debuted on Steam in September 2025. In a Reddit post, they revealed that Google’s AI inadvertently disclosed the name of an upcoming character from Operation Octo that had never been publicly announced. “I had never told the name to anyone,” they stated in the post title.
Klub Kofta Studio has yet to respond to inquiries for further comment. A Google representative clarified that the company does not scan private content to train its AI, providing some context on the situation.
According to Klub Kofta Studio, a player on their Discord server was asking the Google search AI “silly questions” about the game for fun. “But the answers sometimes contained surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine,” they noted.
The studio encouraged the player to ask the AI about future, unannounced content. “Somehow, the AI spat out the exact & highly specific character name ‘Vantage Tripod,’ which I had never mentioned to anyone,” they explained. “As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs, and this was NOT me speaking to the AI!” They even shared screenshots of their Discord conversation, showcasing their astonishment at the AI’s eerily accurate responses.
“My game is not big enough for there to be much noise out there to confuse Google’s AI, so I guess that’s why it managed to give actual, scarily real leaks on my game (without being confused by online speculations), and I have no idea how it knew all this,” they added.
Google’s AI has a tendency to pull information from various sources, including Reddit threads, which can lead to both accurate and inaccurate responses. The AI can also be manipulated, resulting in the spread of unreliable information. For instance, a YouTuber once tricked Google’s AI into believing that GTA 6 would feature a “twerk button” through a simple prank.
As users on Reddit and Bluesky have pointed out, Google automatically opts users into sharing their Google Drive data to enhance AI models, among other purposes. (You can check Google support for guidance on managing your activity with Google’s Gemini features.) For years, major tech companies have been quietly revising their terms of service, opting users into allowing their data to be used for AI training.
“It’s what companies do. Quietly opt all your stuff into AI while trying to avoid announcing it, then bury an option to opt out. The fuckers,” one commenter remarked on the Reddit thread. Others expressed concerns about the potential for personal information to be leaked by AI, especially given that users’ “private” Google Drive data may be included in training sets. “Doesn’t that mean you can dox people by asking very specific questions given that people’s private personal data is included in the training sets then?” another commenter pondered.
If you haven’t already, now might be a good time to review who has access to your public and private data and how it’s being utilized. The idea of retreating to an off-the-grid log cabin has never sounded more appealing.
