Google AI leaked an indie dev's private game content from their own Google Docs

The solo developer behind Operation Octo – a tower defense game that launched on Steam in September 2025 – says Google's AI revealed the name of an unannounced character to a player, information that existed only inside a private Google Doc. The developer, Klub Kofta Studio, never told anyone the name.

It started when a player in Operation Octo's Discord server was asking Google's AI silly questions about the game for fun. The answers kept coming back with oddly specific, accurate details. Klub Kofta asked the player to push further and ask about future content – and the AI produced the exact character name "Vantage Tripod", which the developer had never shared publicly. "As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs," Klub Kofta wrote on Reddit. The developer told Polygon the name was in a single Google Doc file.

Google's official response to Polygon denies that private Workspace content – including Drive and Docs – is used to train its foundational AI models like Gemini, and notes that users control their own sharing settings. But that denial runs into a complication: Google quietly updated its data usage policies. As TechCrunch reported in July 2026, Google sent customers an email in June announcing it now uses saved history and media to "provide, develop, and improve its services (such as training generative AI models)". Critically, that setting is opt-out, not opt-in – meaning most users were enrolled automatically. The 2023 statement from Google Product VP Yulie Kwon Kim, which said Google does not use Workspace data to train AI models without permission, predates that policy change.

Klub Kofta's post on Reddit's r/IndieDev has drawn significant attention, with the developer noting that Operation Octo is small enough that there's little online noise to confuse the AI – which may be exactly why the leak was so precise. The incident raises uncomfortable questions for developers who store unreleased content in Google's ecosystem, and there's currently no clear official explanation for how the AI accessed that specific, private information.