The CEO, the Chatbot, and the $250 Million Lie

In May 2025, Changhan Kim sat down at his computer and asked an AI the question he already knew the answer to. The CEO of Krafton — the South Korean gaming giant behind PUBG, the company that had built itself into a billion-dollar empire — wanted to know how to get out of paying $250 million to the people who had made his company relevant again. He typed it into ChatGPT, probably expecting the chatbot to find him a loophole, a clever workaround, a legal gray area wide enough to drive a truck through. ChatGPT told him no. Not in those words, exactly. But the chatbot did advise that the earnout would be difficult to cancel, according to Delaware Vice Chancellor Lori Will's ruling. It told him, in essence, that this was not a solvable problem. That the contract was the contract. Kim did it anyway. This is the central fact of one of the most extraordinary corporate betrayals in recent gaming history. And it happened just months before Subnautica 2 — the game that triggered all of it — was finally released. The story begins in 2021, when Krafton acquired Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the studio behind Subnautica, for $500 million. Under the terms of the deal, the studio's founders — CEO Ted Gill, co-founder Charlie Cleveland, and co-founder Max McGuire — would retain operational control. They would keep building Subnautica 2. And if the game hit certain targets, Krafton would pay them up to $250 million more. It was, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary arrangement. A parent company paying nearly half a billion dollars extra on top of a half-billion-dollar acquisition price — conditional on the studio performing. It was an earnout structured around trust. By May 2025, internal projections showed Subnautica 2 was going to trigger it. Krafton's own finance department forecast a base-case earnout of $191 million. The game was ready for early access. The team had been building toward this moment for years. Kim, according to the court, believed the deal was a "bad deal." He felt "taken advantage of." His legal team warned him — warned him — that the earnout would still need to be paid even if he fired the founders for cause. His global head of corporate development told him the same thing. The money was coming whether he liked it or not. So he asked the AI. When the AI said no, he formed a task force instead. "When the machine built to reflect human ethics told him the scheme was wrong, he found a different machine to execute it anyway." They called it Project X. Its mandate, according to the court ruling, was to "either negotiate a 'deal' on the earnout or execute a 'takeover' of Unknown Worlds." They looked to buy time. ChatGPT had outlined a communications strategy focused on "fan trust," steps to secure publishing rights over Subnautica 2, and how to prepare a "systematic material of legal defense."