Indie Tooling

Epic will drop Unreal's AI training ban, so write your own terms

Epic says it is removing the Unreal Engine and MetaHuman EULA clause that bars AI training on their output, leaving each game's own terms to decide.

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5 min read

A licence document with one clause crossed out in red, beside a pen and a blank page labelled your terms, with a small robot reaching towards a film strip.
Illustration: Indie Tooling

Epic is working to remove the clause in its Unreal Engine EULA that stops anyone using Unreal Engine or MetaHuman output to train AI. Tim Sweeney confirmed the plan in a post on X, reported by Game Developer on 27 October 2026. Once it goes, each game ships under terms its developer picks, and those terms can allow or forbid training. There is no effective date yet, and Epic hadn’t answered Game Developer’s request for detail at the time of writing.

If you ship on Unreal, that moves a decision from Epic’s licence to yours. Right now Epic’s terms quietly protect your footage and characters from being used as training data. Soon, unless something changes in what’s announced, that protection is whatever you write down.

What the EULA says today

The restriction is fairly recent. Epic’s Unreal Engine EULA change log shows update 20 added express wording that bars using the Licensed Technology as a training input, or as prompt-based input, for a “Generative AI Program”. Developers spotted the new wording on the Unreal forums in October 2024 and argued about how far it reached. Update 21 then added a separate limit on using MetaHuman characters and animation curves with AI.

That MetaHuman limit sits in the EULA because MetaHuman moved under the standard Unreal licence from version 5.6 in mid-2025, as Digital Production reported. The older MetaHuman Creator EULA still governs the cloud tool on 5.5 and earlier. Its section 1.3(j) bans using the technology to build a database or to train or test AI and machine learning systems.

Marketplace content is handled separately. The Epic Content License Agreement change log shows a Section 17 on AI that bars putting “NoAI” tagged content into generative AI datasets. In that same update, Epic also commits not to use or license that content for generative AI itself. On Fab, Epic’s documentation says a seller who wants the NoAI tag has to list the asset under the Standard licence, since the tag doesn’t fit with CC-BY. We covered other recent Fab licence changes in our piece on Fab bundles and UEFN source assets.

Diagram of four licence layers that apply to an Unreal game. The Unreal Engine EULA AI clause from update 20 is marked as being removed. The MetaHuman limit from update 21 and the MetaHuman Creator EULA section 1.3(j) are marked unclear. Fab and Epic Content NoAI rules are marked as no change announced. Your game's own terms are marked as yours to write.
Which layer says what about AI training, on what has been announced so far. Figure: Indie Tooling, from Epic's EULA change logs and Game Developer's report

What is changing, and what isn’t confirmed

Sweeney’s post covers outputs of Unreal Engine and MetaHuman. Game Developer frames it as Epic shifting towards AI-first development, and it notes the timing follows a Kotaku piece on 26 October that called Epic and Microsoft inconsistent for embracing AI coding while taking down AI-built fan recreations of their games. Sweeney had posted more than 50 times about AI in the previous week, by Game Developer’s count.

Plenty is still open. We haven’t seen new EULA text, so we don’t know the exact wording, whether the MetaHuman limit and the Creator EULA’s section 1.3(j) both go, or whether the NoAI rules for Fab and Epic content stay. A NoAI tag is a promise between a seller and a buyer, so on what’s been said so far it has no obvious reason to change. Treat all of this as pending until Epic publishes a new change log entry.

If you don’t want your game used for training

Today, a lab that renders your Unreal game for a dataset arguably breaches Epic’s terms as well as yours. After the change, your own terms carry that weight alone. A few practical steps for a solo dev:

  • Your game’s EULA. If you ship your own EULA, add a plain clause saying players may not use the game, its assets, characters or recorded output to train or test machine learning models. Steam lets you supply a custom EULA, and itch.io and other stores let you link one.
  • Your website and press kit. Put the same statement in the press kit’s terms of use and set your site’s robots.txt to block known AI crawlers. Compliance is voluntary, but the well-behaved ones honour it.
  • Your trailers. On YouTube, third-party training is off by default. TechCrunch reported in December 2024 that creators have to opt in, so check that nobody has ticked the box on your channel.
  • Assets you sell. If you also sell on Fab, use the NoAI tag and the Standard licence.

Be realistic about the limits. A licence binds people who agree to it. A scraper pulling a public trailer has never clicked anything, so your terms may give you little to act on. Enforcement also costs money most solo devs don’t have, and the law on whether training is fair use or permitted text and data mining differs between countries and is still being tested in court. Written terms do help: they make your position clear, they give a platform or publisher something to point to, and they matter in licensing talks. If you want terms you can actually rely on, have a lawyer in your jurisdiction review them. Nothing here is legal advice.

If you want to train your own tools

The change helps you most if you want to build something with your own Unreal output. Today, rendering thousands of frames of your own levels to train a denoiser, or recording MetaHuman faces to train a lip-sync model, sits awkwardly with the EULA. Once the clause is gone, that should be allowed by Epic, subject to the new wording.

Two cautions apply. First, Epic’s restriction is only one layer. Marketplace assets in your scenes carry their own licences, and NoAI-tagged items stay off limits for datasets under the Content License Agreement as it stands. Audit what is actually in frame before you render a training set. Second, a MetaHuman built from a scan of a real person still carries that person’s image rights. The Creator EULA’s section 4 already makes you warrant you have the right to use scans, and training a model on someone’s face raises consent questions an engine licence can’t settle.

If you work this way, keep a short record of which scenes, assets and EULA version each dataset came from. It costs ten minutes and saves arguments later. Our earlier look at AI decompilation and indie games covers the other side of this, when someone else’s tools point at your work.

Sources

Topicsunreal engineeulametahumanai traininglicensing

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