Gabe Newell
Co-founder of Valve
The co-founder of Valve and creator of Steam calls AI a technology transition on par with the computer and the internet — “a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it” — while Steam now welcomes disclosed AI-built games.
In his words
Essentially, AI is going to be a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it.
There was pre-computer and then there was post-computer. There was pre-Internet, and there was post-Internet. Machine learning systems, AI systems, are going to profoundly impact pretty much every single business.
Biography
Gabe Newell (born 1962) spent thirteen years at Microsoft before co-founding Valve in 1996, where he shipped Half-Life, Portal, and — most consequentially — Steam, the storefront that defines PC gaming and made him a billionaire. Famously allergic to interviews and hype, “Gaben” speaks rarely enough that when he does, the games industry parses every word.
A cheat code, not a fad
In a 2025 interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev, Newell placed AI among the epochal shifts of computing — pre- and post-computer, pre- and post-internet — and predicted machine learning would profoundly impact essentially every business. His advice was blunt: figure out how to use AI to do anything better, whatever your profession. He even suggested the technology could produce a funny inversion in which people who never learned to program, but wield AI tools well, outproduce veterans who refuse them.
In a 2026 conversation he extended the point to film, predicting AI’s impact would be an order of magnitude beyond CGI’s and urging directors to actually use the tools. It was not always the obvious position for Valve: in 2023 Steam initially rejected games with AI-generated assets over copyright uncertainty, before reversing course in January 2024 with a disclosure policy — developers declare how AI was used, and the vast majority of AI-assisted games are welcome. By 2025, Valve’s own surveys showed AI usage disclosed in a rapidly growing share of new Steam releases.
Newell’s stance carries structural weight: as the operator of PC gaming’s dominant marketplace, his call — disclose, don’t ban — effectively set AI policy for an entire industry, in contrast to storefronts and festivals that chose prohibition.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/gabe-newell