Epic Games confirms AI is being used to build future versions of Unreal Engine

Epic Games is officially integrating AI into its development workflow, confirming that the next generation of Unreal Engine is being built with the assistance of generative AI tools. According to reporting from Game Developer, the studio is moving forward with an AI-first approach to streamline its internal processes, moving away from legacy coding hurdles that have plagued the engine for years.

AI’s role in engine stability

Marcus Wassmer, Executive Vice President of Development at Epic, confirmed to This Week in Video Games that the company is actively using AI tools like Claude and Codex to write code and develop new features. Perhaps most significantly, these tools have already successfully resolved “non-deterministic cooking bugs”—pesky, inconsistent technical errors that Epic had been struggling to eliminate for over a decade.

Beyond just writing code, Epic is utilizing AI for automatic monitoring of PC stability within Fortnite. This allows the team to identify specific hardware and driver combinations causing crashes much faster than manual testing would permit. Wassmer emphasized that these tools are being used to “modernize” the aging engine code, making it leaner and more stable as the team pivots focus toward Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) and the upcoming UE6.

A shift in development philosophy

Epic’s internal experiments with “vibe coding”—the process of using AI to generate software—recently resulted in a noticeably faster version of the Epic Games Launcher. While some developers have expressed skepticism toward the rise of generative AI in game creation, Wassmer remains unmoved by those concerns.

“We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism,” Wassmer told This Week in Video Games. He believes that integrating AI into software development will soon become ubiquitous, as the resulting tools are simply more capable of responding to user feedback and delivering higher-quality products than those built through traditional manual methods alone.

Why it matters

For players and developers, this shift signals a major change in how Epic delivers performance and features. By using AI to identify hardware-specific stability issues and clean up decade-old bugs, future iterations of Unreal Engine could lead to more stable games with fewer technical hiccups at launch.

If you are a developer, expect a faster pace of engine updates as Epic leverages these AI tools to modernize its workflow. While the studio is currently prioritizing UEFN and UE6, a potential 5.9 update could serve as a test case for these AI-developed systems. Moving forward, the quality of games and tools delivered will be the metric by which Epic hopes to validate this controversial, yet undeniably impactful, transition.