Google AI Leaks Indie Game Character From Private Docs, Developer Says
The incident highlights the gap between Google's stated privacy policy and the reality that AI answers can surface information from sources users did not intend to make public.
Reporting from 1 source: GameBusiness.jp.
Club Kofta Studio, developer of the indie game Operation Octo, reported on Reddit that Google's search AI named an unreleased character, Vantage Tripod, which the developer claims existed only in private Google Docs. Google denied leaking private data, noting that publicly shared links can be indexed. The incident has spread online, and the AI now pulls the name from Reddit posts.
Club Kofta Studio, the developer of Operation Octo, a tower defense game with bullet hell elements released on Steam in September 2025, said a player on the game's Discord server reported that Google's search AI named unreleased characters, including Vantage Tripod and Skeleton Dragon.
The developer said Skeleton Dragon had been hinted at on the store page, but Vantage Tripod was not in the game's code, serialized data, local files, or on Steam. The only place it existed as digital data, they claimed, was in their private Google Docs.
Google told Polygon it does not use private Workspace content to train its foundational AI models, but noted that links to publicly shared documents can be indexed by search engine crawlers. The incident has spread, and the AI now pulls the name from Reddit posts, so the original situation cannot be reproduced.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- GameBusiness.jp Google AI概要がインディゲームの未発表情報を漏洩？開発者は非公開のGoogleドキュメント上にしかない情報と主張