Leak coverage runs on a small vocabulary that almost nobody defines, and the same word does different work depending on who is using it. Eighteen terms appear across this archive; these are the senses they carry here. Three of them decide most arguments on their own. Build tells you how old a piece of footage is and therefore how much it is worth. Datamining separates people reading public records from people breaking into systems. And the DMCA notice is, in practice, the closest thing this subject has to an official confirmation, because a legal department only spends money asserting ownership of things it actually owns.

Terms

teapotuberhacker

The GTAForums account that posted the September 2022 leak. The name belongs to Arion Kurtaj, later placed under an indefinite hospital order for the intrusion.

Lapsus$

The hacking group Kurtaj founded. Before Rockstar it had already hit Nvidia and the UK telecoms operators EE and BT.

DMCA takedown

A copyright removal request. For GTA 6 leaks it doubles as a credibility test: Take-Two rarely files against fakes, so a wave of takedowns is treated as circumstantial proof the material is genuine.

Build

A compiled snapshot of the game at one moment in development. Leaked footage always comes from a build, and the age of that build decides how much the footage still means.

Pre-alpha

Development state before the game is feature-complete. The 2022 leak was pre-alpha: stand-in textures, debug overlays and unfinished animation.

Datamining

Reading shipped or public files — game data, DNS records, store metadata — for information the publisher did not announce. The September 2025 domain find was datamining, not hacking.

Nameserver

The DNS host a domain points at. Eight GTA 6-flavoured domains sitting on Take-Two's nameservers is what made the September 2025 registrations credible, and their removal a day later is what made them interesting.

Leonida

The fictional state the game is set in, modelled on Florida. Rockstar has named six places inside it and published no map.

Six-star wanted level

A sixth police escalation tier, present in GTA III through San Andreas, absent from IV and V, and visible in the HUD of the August 2026 leaked clips.

Mapping Project

The community effort that reconstructs the Leonida map from official frames. It is the group that publicly disputed the August 2026 leaked map image.

Insider

A community figure with a track record of accurate pre-announcement information. Tex2 is the most cited for GTA; a track record is the only thing separating an insider from an account with a screenshot.

AI-generated fake

Synthetic video passed off as leaked footage. It became the dominant category of fake GTA 6 leak during 2025 and 2026, and it is why Take-Two's own legal action now carries more weight than visual analysis.

Newswire

Rockstar's own announcement channel. Every hard fact about release dates, editions and platforms on this site traces to a dated Newswire post rather than to press aggregation.

Press kit

The official media package on rockstargames.com/VI: 70 screenshots, 121 artwork files, 51 Ultimate Edition images and 12 Vintage Vice City Pack images, published for download and sharing. Every image on this site comes from it.

EXIF

Metadata embedded in a photograph — camera, timestamp, sometimes location. It is what turned the January 2025 office photo from an anonymous screen shot into a datable record of Rockstar San Diego in June 2021.

Euphoria

The procedural animation middleware Rockstar has used since Grand Theft Auto IV. It gives bodies momentum and recovery, and its absence is the clearest tell in synthetic footage claiming to be GTA 6.

Watermark

An overlay burned into leaked video, usually promoting whoever is spreading it. The early Trailer 1 copy carried 'BUY $BTC' across the picture, which is why Rockstar moved its premiere forward rather than let that version stand.

Track record

The only thing separating an insider from an account with a screenshot. Tex2 has one because the September 2025 domain registrations were independently checkable at the time they were posted.

Why "build" carries the most weight

Of the twelve terms, build is the one that most often decides an argument. Every piece of leaked footage is a snapshot of one moment in development, and Grand Theft Auto VI has been in development long enough for those moments to be years apart. The 2022 files were pre-alpha. The January 2025 photograph showed a screen from June 2021. The August 2026 clips run on a build outlets place around 2023 to 2024 — before the delay of 2 May 2025 and before the delay of 6 November 2025.

That is why a system observed in leaked footage is recorded here as observed rather than confirmed. It is evidence about what Rockstar was building at a point in time, which is a different claim from what will be on the disc in November.

The words that do damage

Two terms in this list are routinely used to mean their opposite. The first is confirmed. In leak coverage it usually means several outlets repeated the same claim, which is a measure of circulation rather than of truth — a claim can be confirmed in that sense and still trace back to one direct message, as the map-size figure does. On this site confirmed means a first-party statement exists and is dated. The second is insider. It has no threshold: anyone can adopt it, and most accounts using it have no checkable history at all. Tex2 is cited here because the September 2025 domain registrations could be verified by anyone with a DNS lookup at the time they were posted, not because of the label.

A third word does damage by being technically correct. Real. Leaked footage can be entirely real and still describe a game that no longer exists — the August 2026 clips are real and come from a build made before two delays. Asking whether footage is real answers a smaller question than most people think they are asking. The more useful question is how old it is, which is why the build entry above sits at the centre of this glossary rather than at the end of it.