Xbox senior business strategy manager Brandon Stirrup is tired of pussyfooting around about AI: In a thread on X his week, he said that he wants the world to know that Xbox uses it, that he thinks everyone should be using it, and that he believes so strongly in the cause that he’s willing to “take the hit” for saying so.
He has since deleted his X account. A source at Xbox tells PC Gamer that Stirrup opted to deactivate the account because of the volume of replies he was receiving.
Stirrup kicked off his thread on October 18 with a simple message saying he’d “vibe coded a bad but improvable game” over two days, although he only “actively” worked on it for about three hours. “I’m telling you I tried it and it’s true…anyone can build a game.”
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After saying that developers and studios who aren’t incorporating AI into their strategies are “planning for a fake future,” Stirrup went all in.
“Look if I’m fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know. 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,” he wrote.
“I’m happy to take the hit if it means hundreds at Xbox can stop pretending that they’re not using AI. It’s time to accept and move forward.”
After calling out the game industry and gamers alike for their reluctance to accept “reality,” Stirrup stated explicitly that Xbox is “using AI” and then added, “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.”
There’s a growing push for people to simply accept the “reality” of AI: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, for instance, recently said the studio was “moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration,” after which the Epic Games Store ignited a firestorm by saying it “vibe coded” its new launcher. Xbox, now under the leadership of a former AI executive, recently launched a new Xbox Labs program to pursue emerging technologies, which naturally includes AI; even Linux recently dropped its rule requiring AI usage disclosures.
Stirrup himself is an enthusiastic AI evangelist: Last month, he also counselled laid-off employees to use Copilot to catalog their skills and accomplishments at the company.
