Epic Games pulls back the curtain on Unreal Engine 6, revealing exactly what everyone expected

Epic Games has recently wrapped up its State of Unreal 2026 livestream, where it pulled back the curtain on the upcoming Unreal Engine 6.

Unreal Engine 6 was first teased during a recent Rocket League Champion Series, and in that announcement, Epic Games stated that Rocket League would be the first title to adopt the new version of Unreal Engine, which is quite a considerable jump, as Rocket League was built on Unreal Engine 3. Epic explained that it plans to merge Unreal Engine 5 and the Fortnite Unreal Editor to create Unreal Engine 6, and that this update will include integrating popular AI models, such as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini.

"Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the amount of iterations a team can make to polish their content. UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models, battle-tested against internal development and in UEFN," said Epic Games in a statement to VideoGamesChronicle

The idea behind integrating these AI models is to multiply developers' creativity, as Epic believes teams will now be able to "focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks". Epic even went on to provide examples of how developers can increase their output by offloading trivial tasks to AI models, stating that AI models can handle "setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting".

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Unreal Engine 6 debuting with AI integration isn't surprising at all, and in fact, I would have been more shocked if Epic Games didn't include support for AI models, especially considering the explosion in popularity of specific AI models such as Anthropic's Claude Code.