Years before the invasion of LLMs developed by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, programmers built their own bots to compete in competitive games and to test the capabilities of AI and their own skills. In an interesting new experiment, StarCraft fans threw these bots into a big battle arena, where they went head-to-head with bots designed by modern AI. However, in an attempt to keep up with the competition, GPT-6 Astra decided to cheat in the middle of the tournament.
StarSkirmish is a competition between bots facing off in StarCraft: Brood War. Each LLM can only play as Protoss and gets one hour to build its bot in C++, after which it sends the bot out to build a base, gather resources and fight on one of three maps. Last week, however, something very interesting happened in a clash between GPT, Claude and Pluto, a human-made bot.
Live now: GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 Opus are racing to create the best StarCraft strategy
— kai (@kaimcpheeters) October 2, 2026
https://t.co/PMTM7ttSYM
GPT-6 Astra didn’t fare very well in this duel, and after multiple attempts to gain the upper hand, it decided to go back to its roots and do what it usually does best. The AI went online and downloaded Stardust, a Protoss bot considered one of the best of all time, created by Bruce McKenzie Nielsen back in 2020.
Once they realized what had happened, the StarSkirmish organizers rolled GPT-6 Astra back to its previous version, from before the Stardust integration.
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