A gaming CEO asked ChatGPT how to avoid paying a $250 million bonus. It didn’t work

When Changhan Kim, CEO of the South Korean gaming company Krafton, decided he needed a way out of a costly acquisition deal, he didn’t call his lawyers—he opened ChatGPT. The result is one of the most striking cautionary tales about AI-assisted decision-making in corporate America, and it ended with a Delaware judge ordering the company reverse everything it had done.

A Delaware judge found Kim used ChatGPT to engineer the removal of Unknown Worlds Entertainment—the indie studio responsible for the underwater survival game Subnautica—CEO Ted Gill from the company to dodge a $250 million bonus payout. 

“Fearing he had agreed to a ‘pushover’ contract, Krafton’s CEO consulted an artificial intelligence chatbot to contrive a corporate ‘takeover’ strategy,” Delaware’s Court of Chancery Vice Chancellor Lori Will wrote in a ruling on Tuesday. 

In 2021, Krafton, the publisher behind the global phenomenon PUBG: Battlegrounds, acquired Unknown Worlds Entertainment for $500 million. As part of the deal, Krafton agreed to pay an additional $250 million earn-out bonus if the studio’s hotly anticipated sequel, Subnautica 2, hit certain sales targets. The contract also guaranteed that Unknown Worlds would remain independent, with cofounders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, along with Gill, retaining operational control—and only being removed for cause.

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