Every Major GTA 6 Leak, Fact-Checked

GTA 6’s road to release has had an unusually large number of genuine leaks attached to it, which has made it harder than usual to tell verified information apart from confident-sounding speculation. Laid out in order, though, the actual timeline is more manageable than the constant stream of “GTA 6 leak” headlines might suggest.

The largest and most consequential leak happened in September 2022, when a hacker using the handle “teapotuberhacker,” later identified as 17-year-old Arion Kurtaj, founder of the Lapsus$ group, posted roughly ninety files containing about fifty minutes of genuine, early development footage to GTAForums. We’ve covered that incident in full detail separately, but it remains the single largest leak in the game’s history and, for a long time, the only real look anyone outside Rockstar had at the game in progress.

More than a year later, in December 2023, a smaller but still notable leak occurred: GTA 6’s first official trailer leaked on social media ahead of Rockstar’s planned release schedule, forcing the studio to publish it early through its own channels rather than on its own timeline. Around the same period, short panning footage of the map surfaced separately on TikTok, reportedly traced back to a relative of a Rockstar North executive rather than any organized breach, a reminder that not every leak involves hacking; sometimes it’s just someone close to the project sharing something they shouldn’t have.

January 2025 brought a smaller, stranger leak: a briefly circulated photo showing a monitor in what appeared to be a Rockstar office, displaying Lucia in a construction environment near what’s been described as a silage bunker, with a PlayStation 5 development kit visible on the desk. It’s the kind of leak that’s easy to overinterpret. A single blurry photo doesn’t confirm much about the actual game, but it was treated as broadly credible at the time given the specificity of the setting shown.

Later in 2025, dataminers took a different approach entirely, uncovering a wave of newly registered website domains registered under Take-Two’s own nameservers, not gameplay footage, but evidence of the satirical in-game internet Rockstar builds into every GTA, effectively confirming some of that world’s fictional websites exist before the game even shipped. Most recently, in August 2026, an account calling itself Cyberleek circulated fourteen alleged gameplay clips along with images claiming to show the complete Leonida map, the most recent addition to the timeline. Like most late-stage leaks, it’s harder to verify with full confidence, simply because it’s more recent and less independently corroborated than the older, more thoroughly examined material.

The throughline across all of this is that the most reliable leaks tend to be the ones tied to a specific, verifiable event: a hack with a named and convicted perpetrator, a trailer that leaked and was then officially confirmed, domain registrations anyone can look up. The leaks worth treating more skeptically are the ones that arrive as a handful of images from an anonymous account with no clear origin story. Both categories get called “leaks” in headlines. They deserve different levels of trust.