The legal dispute between Krafton and the former top dogs at Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds is now at the point where the lawyers are fully in control, sifting through the sands of everything everyone's said and done over the past decade or so in search of the Ace Attorney bomb that will blow things wide open. It's something of a drag, to be honest—a lot of he said/she said—but one interestingly odd bit did emerge from the smoke. Krafton CEO Changham Kim reportedly asked ChatGPT to help him figure out how to avoid paying the Subnautica 2 earnout he'd agreed to when acquiring Unknown Worlds.
When asked yesterday whether that claim was accurate, Krafton denied it and described the allegation as a "distraction from [the former Unknown Worlds heads] own efforts to destroy evidence." Court transcripts released today reveal something of a different story, however.
"I started discussing this matter with various teams within the company to find—to figure out what we could do," Kim testified in his deposition (via translator) when asked what he did when he discovered that Subnautica designer and director Charlie Cleveland and Unknown Worlds co-founder Max McGuire weren't directly involved in the development of Subnautica 2.
"So I talked to the legal team, the finance team, and the corporate team and the PR, all these various teams, and I also actually searched on ChatGPT to get faster answers to figure out what kind of rights we have."
When asked why he would consult with ChatGPT on a matter like this, Kim said, "I think, just like everyone else, I am using ChatGPT to get faster answers or responses, just like Google search."
During cross-examination, lawyers for the former Unknown Worlds principals also point out that in a June 2 message sent to Krafton head of corporate development Maria Park, Kim included a ChatGPT link, and subsequently referenced the chatbot's advice directly: "Now, ChatGPT [is] start[ing] to answer that it is difficult to cancel the earn-out," Kim told Park in June. "If so, this is a contract under which we can only be dragged around."
The lawyers also point out that while that particular ChatGPT conversation was subsequently deleted, as was one about a "no-deal scenario" with the studio, others from around the same time still exist. On redirect, Kim said he deleted those queries because "what I learned is that—from OpenAI, is that if you use certain important information concerning your company, then that type of information can be used by OpenAI for learning purposes."
It's all rather messy: Kim, who acknowledged making "dozens" of ChatGPT inquiries every day regarding general business at Krafton, said he was merely using it to research his options, as he would with any other search engine. And that's maybe to be expected, given Krafton's embrace of AI: In October, the company announced an "AI-first strategy," which Kim said at the time will help it "lead AI innovation across the gaming industry." The company also plans to spend $70 million on a GPU cluster to "support multi-stage tasks requiring sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning [and] serve as the foundation for accelerating the implementation of agentic AI."
But with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, not to mention the future of one of Krafton's potentially most lucrative games, I would think that shareholders would expect more from their CEO than just kickin' it around with a chatbot. The deletion of inquiries related to Unknown Worlds also casts a pall on things: Kim said he simply "deleted those things that included [the] company's confidential information," but coupled with yesterday's flat-out denial of any ChatGPT usage regarding the matter, it all starts to look rather shaky.
I've reached out to Krafton for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
