Epic Games has confirmed that it is now using AI tools to develop code for Unreal Engine. CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed it on X, and Marcus Wassmer, the company's executive vice president of development, said the tools are now working across the engine's development process — bringing AI into how the engine is built and maintained, not just into the games made with it.

The confirmation

In a 23 October 2026 exchange on X, the account BenjiGameDev asked whether Epic was now using AI tools to develop Unreal Engine. Sweeney replied, "Yes, we are now using AI tools to develop code for Unreal Engine."

That is a reversal. In a November 2025 reply to the same account, Sweeney had denied that Epic was using AI to build features for the engine. The shift follows a direction he set earlier this month, when he described a "huge pivot" at the company to "retool for maximum AI acceleration."

Wassmer made the confirmation explicit in a statement to This Week in Videogames. "As we mentioned back at Unreal Fest in Chicago on stage and in interviews, we are definitely using AI to develop code and features for Unreal Engine," he said, adding that "almost all development happening right now is being done in the dev streams attached to Fortnite, UEFN [Unreal Editor for Fortnite], and UE6." Asked about the reaction from people skeptical of AI, Wassmer said the company is "more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism."

Where the tools are already used

Epic gave specifics in its June 2026 "Road to Unreal Engine 6" post, also written by Wassmer. The company said it has "recently opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams."

The post lists where the tools have already proven useful internally:

  • Custom tools that engineers write for their own work
  • Fast code indexing that helps large language models work across a codebase the size of Unreal Engine
  • Incident-response analysis
  • Automated root-cause analysis for crashes and CI job failures
  • Automated test generation
  • Accelerating and parallelizing backend service development

Notably, Epic said "most of these use cases aren't even generating mainline Unreal Engine code, though that will probably come eventually as well."

Context

Unreal Engine 6 is set to unify Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) into a single engine, with an Early Access release targeted for the end of 2027 and a full release 12 to 18 months later. AI is being built into that next engine as part of the first-party development pipeline: the "Road to UE6" plan describes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and other models, alongside the Epic Developer Assistant (EDA) as an optional turnkey tool. A new scripting language, Verse, underpins the UE6 gameplay framework.

For developers and studios that build on Unreal, the practical takeaway is that Epic is now using AI inside its own engineering process and is embedding the same model-assisted workflow into the next engine it ships.

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