Games Workshop says its senior managers aren’t excited about AI, prohibits its use and laments that it’s ‘included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not’

Warhammer company Games Workshop says that it does not allow generative AI in its products, and although some of its senior managers have investigated the technology, “none are that excited about it yet.”

The comments came from Games Workshop CEO Kevin Rountree in the company’s half-yearly financial report for the back end of 2025, in which it declared revenue of £332.1m ($445.9m USD), up from £299.5m ($402.1m USD) in 2024.

Rountree goes on to explain GW’s “very cautious” internal policy on AI, which is that “we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes or its unauthorised use outside of GW including in any of our competitions.” Those’ll be the Golden Demon painting competitions, which banned AI in 2024 after one of the previous year’s winners was found to have used AI-generated art created by Midjourney in a printed backdrop behind the miniature.

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While Rountree does say the company is “allowing those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology”, this still comes off as an explicitly anti-AI stance. Rountree goes on to mention that GW spent the six months in question “hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting and art to writing and sculpting” rather than, say, laying them off and replacing them with chatbots that hallucinate.

There’s also an amusingly personal tone of grievance to the complaint that “AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not.” It’s nice to know that even the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company is annoyed by the insertion of AI into every single app or service, whether it’s relevant or not.

In the Warhammer 40,000 setting AI is forbidden—it stands for “Abominable Intelligence” in the Imperium and is considered tech-heresy by the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. It’s amusing to see the company behind Warhammer 40,000 take a similar stance, although presumably they don’t agree with tech-priests about the value of turning employee’s skulls into flying drones with cameras in them.