The GTA 6 Subpoenas Have Three Return Dates, Not One

Every outlet covering Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto VI leak investigation has printed the same date. Four September. It is a real date, and we have now read it off the subpoena forms themselves rather than taking it from anybody else's story. It is also only the first of three. The four miscellaneous proceedings Take-Two opened in the Southern District of New York in August each attach a completed federal subpoena form as Exhibit A. Those forms carry a field headed Production: Date and Time. Read across all four proceedings, that field holds three live dates, not one: 4 September for Microsoft and for the first Discord subpoena, 8 September for X Corp., and 14 September for the second, part-sealed Discord subpoena that Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. granted on 31 August. A fourth date, 8 September for Google, is dead, because Take-Two withdrew that request before the clerk issued anything. Before any of the detail, the frame, because it is routinely lost. None of this is a lawsuit. A subpoena under section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an ex parte identity-disclosure mechanism. There is no defendant, no complaint, no adversary and no finding that anybody infringed anything. Microsoft, Discord, Google and X Corp. are recipients of process, which is to say custodians of records who have been asked for them. None of them is accused of anything. Take-Two has still not sued anyone over the Grand Theft Auto VI leak. There is no complaint and no named defendant anywhere on any of these dockets. What we read, and how CONFIRMED, read directly from the filed PDFs through the RECAP document store. Each of the four requests attaches a completed AO 88B, the standard federal form headed "Subpoena to Produce Documents, Information, or Objects or to Permit Inspection of Premises in a Civil Action". Two of the four documents, the pair filed by Kirkland and Ellis, still carry live AcroForm field values. The figures below are therefore the literal contents of those form fields rather than an optical reading of a scanned page, which matters, because a scan can be misread and a form field cannot. The five exhibits were fetched between 03:14:27 and 03:15:14 UTC on 2 September 2026, all HTTP 200, at 835,534 bytes (Microsoft), 866,283 bytes (Discord round one), 574,240 bytes (Discord round two), 537,926 bytes (Google) and 517,995 bytes (X Corp.). The return-date map 1:26-mc-00421, Microsoft Corporation. Return date on the form: 9/4/2026 10:00AM. Service address is Microsoft Corporation care of Corporation Services Company, 80 State Street, Albany. Production is demanded at Kirkland and Ellis care of a litigation services vendor in Woodbury, New York. Granted by Judge Jennifer L. Rochon on 21 August. Live. 1:26-mc-00422, Discord, Inc., first round. Return date: 9/4/2026 10:00 am. Service address is Discord care of CT Corporation System, 28 Liberty Street, New York. Production at Kirkland and Ellis, 601 Lexington Avenue. Granted by Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. on 21 August. Live. 1:26-mc-00422, Discord, Inc., second round. Return date: 09/14/2026 10:00 am. Same service address, same production address. Granted by Judge Carter on 31 August, at docket entry 10. Live. 1:26-mc-00425, Google LLC. Return date on the form: 09/08/2026 10:00 am, with production demanded at Ruttenberg IP Law in White Plains. Moot. Take-Two withdrew the request on 28 August and Judge John P. Cronan closed the case on 31 August. The subpoena was never issued. Do not count this one as pending. 1:26-mc-00426, X Corp. Return date: 09/08/2026 10:00. Service address is X Corp. care of United Agent Group Inc. in Harrison, New York. Production at Ruttenberg IP Law. Granted by Judge Analisa Torres on 24 August. Live. So the forward calendar on this beat runs 4 September, then 8 September, then 14 September. Every piece of coverage we have found reports only the 4 September date, taken from the first-round Microsoft and Discord attachments. The 8 September X Corp. date and the 14 September second-Discord date do not appear to have been reported anywhere. We use that phrasing deliberately. We cannot prove a negative about the whole of the internet, and we are not going to claim a scoop in language that pretends we can. One further detail off the face of the forms, because it shows who is doing what. Dale M. Cendali signs the court filings. Joshua L. Simmons signs the subpoena forms. Both are at Kirkland and Ellis, 601 Lexington Avenue, and the signature block on all three Kirkland subpoenas is Simmons's, for the party Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. The form date on the round-one pair is 8/20/2026. The form date on the round-two Discord subpoena is 08/28/2026. What a return date is, and what it is not This is the part that gets flattened into "Microsoft has until 4 September", and that sentence is wrong in three separate ways. The date is counsel's demand, not the court's order. The judge signs an order directing the clerk to issue a subpoena. The requesting party fills in the return date on the form. Nothing in any of the four orders sets a compliance deadline, mentions a date, or says a word about what happens if a recipient does not produce by it. Under Rule 45 the recipient may serve written objections, and the printed rule gives it until the earlier of the time specified for compliance or fourteen days after service to do so. It may also move to quash or modify. The relevant subsections of Rule 45 are printed on page four of every one of these exhibits, in the standard boilerplate marked effective 1 December 2013, and we rendered that page to confirm it. Service starts the clock, not issuance. A subpoena that has been issued but not served demands nothing from anybody. No return of service appears on any of the four dockets. No proof of compliance, no objection, no motion to quash by any recipient. The only public statement from any recipient we could date is Discord's, given to PC Gamer's Harvey Randall and published on 25 August, in which the company's marketing director Ryan K. Rigney wrote that Discord "has not yet been served with a subpoena from Take Two" and that when it is, "we'll evaluate the validity and scope before responding". That quote is eight days old, it predates the second Discord request entirely, and aggregators are still running it as though it describes today. If you see it quoted without a date, that is why we are giving you one. The recipients are not parties. Microsoft, Discord and X Corp. are records custodians. Writing that any of them faces a deadline in the way a defendant faces one imports a posture that does not exist here. The sealing motion is still unruled, and we checked it against a live court feed On 28 August, Kirkland and Ellis filed a three-page letter motion asking Judge Carter for leave to file Attachment A to the second Discord subpoena under seal. Its scope is narrow and the motion says so, verbatim: Take-Two seeks only to seal the Subpoena Attachment, not any other portion of its request or the Subpoena. The reason given, also verbatim: The Subpoena Attachment reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two's confidential information. Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two's ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two's investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement, creating a substantial risk that the infringers will delete, destroy, or otherwise conceal evidence of their infringing activities, and/or take further steps to evade identification. Three days later Judge Carter granted the subpoena. His order is silent on sealing. As of the docket page re-read at 03:11:51 UTC on 2 September, there is no docket entry 11 and no order on that motion. The subpoena has issued and the request to seal the attachment defining what it demands is still pending. A method note, because RECAP alone could not answer this. RECAP is a crowd-sourced mirror of PACER and it lags. Its own refresh stamp for the Discord case reads 31 August at 7:10 p.m. Eastern, which is 23:10 UTC, so anything docketed after that would not show. To close the gap we went to the court's own public feed instead: the Southern District of New York's recent-entries RSS, fetched at 03:18:50 UTC, HTTP 200, 1,219,083 bytes, carrying 2,648 items spanning 1 September 03:05:39 UTC to 2 September 02:57:08 UTC. The feed's own description names the entry types it covers, and orders are among them. None of the four Take-Two proceedings appears anywhere in that district-wide 24-hour feed. The control that makes the absence mean something: an unrelated sibling miscellaneous case, 1:26-mc-00428, surfaces twice in the same window with an order entry and an order referring the case to a magistrate judge. Miscellaneous-case orders demonstrably do appear in this feed. The limit, stated as a limit. There is a blind spot of three hours and fifty-five minutes for the Discord case, between RECAP's last refresh at 23:10 UTC on 31 August and the feed's earliest item at 03:05 UTC on 1 September. Judge Carter may have ruled inside it. He may rule at any moment. He may never rule separately, if the sealed notice was accepted at filing. No ruling is not a denial and it is not a grant, and we are not going to write that anybody refused, ignored or sat on anything. The public version of the second Discord subpoena is a black rectangle Docket entry 7-1 in the Discord case is titled "Exhibit A - DMCA Subpoena - Public Redacted Version". We opened it and read its internal structure object by object. It is five pages. Pages two, three and four are flattened raster images, 1224 by 1584 pixels each, with no extractable text beyond a 74-character electronic filing header stamp. Rendered, they are the completed subpoena form, which is where the 14 September return date lives, then the proof-of-service page, then the Rule 45 boilerplate. Page five is not an image. It is a form object whose entire content stream is 100 bytes long, and the whole of it draws one filled rectangle: 0 TL q 0 g q 1 0 0 1 21.8183 50.1785 cm 0 0 m 564.657 0 l 564.657 630.985 l 0 630.985 l 0 0 l f Q Q In that instruction set, 0 g sets the fill colour to black, the path traces a rectangle 564.657 points wide and 630.985 points tall, which is roughly 7.84 inches by 8.76 inches, and f fills it. The public Attachment A is a single black rectangle covering the page. There is nothing else on it. The contrast with round one is the point. In the first-round exhibits, that same fifth page is live text: 1,582 extractable characters in the Microsoft exhibit, 1,193 in the Discord exhibit, 785 in the X Corp. exhibit. That is how the press was able to report what Take-Two asked for in August. In round two there is nothing to read at all, which is why the second request is being described everywhere only through Take-Two's own summary of it. The hedges here are load-bearing. Redacting a filing is normal, lawful practice, Take-Two filed a motion asking permission to do it, and a black box is not evidence of anything improper. Rasterising the whole document before redacting is a belt-and-braces choice that prevents text being recovered from underneath a drawn box, which is the classic failed-redaction error, and plenty of firms do it for exactly that reason. What we did not read, and will not print Our researcher did not read, extract, transcribe or record the contents of Attachment A in any first-round exhibit. Those are the pages that carry the persona and account identifiers. We confirmed only that they exist and how many characters they hold, which is why the numbers above are character counts and nothing else. We are not naming, describing or otherwise making identifiable any individual swept into any of these attachments, and we are not reproducing any handle, guild identifier or account name from a court exhibit. That is this desk's own decision. The reason is that a section 512(h) subpoena adjudicates nothing, its whole premise is that the requesting party does not yet know who it is looking for, and the first Discord request reportedly reached every account that posted in three named servers, which is to say a great many ordinary people who did nothing at all. Nobody named in one of these attachments has been sued, charged or accused of anything in any filed complaint. What is and is not established CONFIRMED, from live form fields in the filed exhibits: return dates of 9/4/2026 10:00AM for Microsoft, 9/4/2026 10:00 am for the first Discord subpoena, 09/14/2026 10:00 am for the second Discord subpoena, and 09/08/2026 10:00 for X Corp. The Google form reads 09/08/2026 10:00 am and is moot. CONFIRMED: Joshua L. Simmons signs the three Kirkland subpoena forms; Dale M. Cendali signs the court filings. Form dates are 8/20/2026 for the round-one pair and 08/28/2026 for the round-two Discord subpoena. CONFIRMED as of 02:57 UTC on 2 September, against the court's own feed: no order of any covered type had been docketed in any of the four proceedings in the preceding 24 hours, with an unrelated miscellaneous case appearing twice in the same window as the control. The 28 August sealing motion remains unruled on the face of the record. CONFIRMED by direct inspection: the fifth page of the public redacted second Discord exhibit is a 100-byte content stream drawing one black-filled rectangle, against 1,582, 1,193 and 785 characters of live text on the equivalent page of the three first-round exhibits. Not a lawsuit: all four proceedings are ex parte identity-disclosure applications. Granted means the clerk will issue the subpoena and nothing more. Withdrawn is not denied. Microsoft, Discord, Google and X Corp. are recipients of process and not defendants. Take-Two has still sued nobody, and there is no complaint and no named defendant on any docket. Explicitly not claimed: that a court has ordered anybody to produce anything by any of these dates, that any recipient has been served, or that any recipient has produced anything. No return of service exists on any of the four dockets. Explicitly not claimed: that a redaction is improper. It is ordinary practice and Take-Two asked the court for leave. Explicitly withheld by us: everything on Attachment A. We did not read those pages and we are not naming or describing anybody who appears on them. Method limits printed as limits: RECAP mirrors PACER and lags; the live-feed check carries a disclosed blind spot of three hours and fifty-five minutes for the Discord case; and CourtListener refuses automated fetchers, so the docket pages were read over curl with a browser user agent. Our running ledger of what is established about this game, as against what is circulating, is on the wiki, and the rest of today's filings and storefront work is on the news desk. If court records are not what you came for, the servers list and the leaderboards are open for the next 78 days.