Hooded Horse Adds No AI Assets Clause to Publishing Contracts and Calls GenAI Cancerous
Hooded Horse, the publisher that broke into the mainstream conversation through its involvement with Manor Lords and has since built a reputation around strategy, tactics, and city building projects, is taking one of the most aggressive public stances yet against generative AI in game development. In an interview with Kotaku, Hooded Horse chief executive officer Tim Bender said the publisher will not sign studios that use GenAI and confirmed that the company has added a direct no AI assets clause into its contracts that bans any generative AI assets from being used in games it publishes.
Bender’s comments are not carefully sanitized corporate language. He describes GenAI art as something that has made his life and his team’s work more difficult, arguing that it creates an ongoing risk of unwanted content slipping into builds, promotional assets, or final releases. In the interview, he says Hooded Horse has reached a point where it actively recommends developers avoid using GenAI anywhere in the pipeline, even as placeholder content, because placeholders have a habit of surviving into later builds. His framing is that it only takes one instance of generated material being overlooked for it to end up shipped or circulated, creating both ethical exposure and operational overhead for the publisher. That is why he characterizes the problem as cancerous, describing it as something that spreads into places it should not be and forces constant monitoring and cleanup.
The key business takeaway is that Hooded Horse is treating GenAI as a contractual compliance problem, not just a marketing optics problem. Bender explicitly frames the issue as ethics rather than PR, arguing that the commitment required is to keep GenAI out of the shipped game and to remove and replace anything discovered later, even if it comes from outsourced artists or third party contributors. That stance effectively shifts GenAI from an optional productivity tool into a prohibited supply chain contaminant, with the publisher positioning itself as the enforcement layer that must protect both audience trust and creator rights.
This hardline approach also lands in a moment when GenAI is still one of the most divisive topics in the games industry. Some studios have faced heavy backlash after acknowledging experimentation with GenAI tools, while other teams continue to use automation without hesitation, often pointing to production efficiency and iteration speed as the north star. Hooded Horse is signaling it has chosen a different operating model, one that prioritizes provenance, human made creative output, and contractual enforcement even if that increases friction and slows development in the short term.
The enforcement challenge is the real pressure point. Bender acknowledges that writing a ban into a contract is the easy part, while proving that no GenAI assets were used across a modern production pipeline is far harder. The publisher’s solution, based on the interview, is process discipline and cultural reinforcement: discourage GenAI even for prototypes, treat it as an unacceptable risk vector, and maintain a zero tolerance replacement policy if anything slips through.
Whether other publishers follow this path will depend on their brand positioning, their audience, and how they weigh risk versus production speed. But Hooded Horse’s stance is an important signal that the anti GenAI movement is no longer limited to individual artists or outspoken developers. It is now reaching publisher level governance, which is where real leverage sits in the indie ecosystem.
Do you want more publishers to adopt a strict no GenAI assets contract policy, or do you think bans like this will be impractical to enforce and ultimately push GenAI use further underground?
