Ahead of the launch of Black Ops 6, Activision has said it’s using AI in its ongoing battle against Call of Duty cheaters, and hopes to kick cheaters out of the game within one hour of them being in their first match.

Call of Duty has had a cheating problem for years, with free-to-download battle royale Warzone on PC suffering in particular. Activision has spent millions of dollars developing its anti-cheat technology as well as pursuing cheat makers in the courts, with a number of recent high-profile successes stemming the tide.

But video game publishers face an uphill battle in the war against the increasingly sophisticated cheat makers, so Activision has announced plans to draft in AI to help.

“Fighting cheats today – on the client where illicit programs are activated – is a little like battling on a bad guy’s home turf: it is their machine and their code,” Activision said in a blog post.

“Kernel-level drivers on PC have enhanced anti-cheat’s reach, but cheaters are already offering cheats that go beyond the kernel, even going as far to utilize special PC hardware that is designed entirely for attacking games and enabling cheating.

“What our team has been working on for the future is a suite of tools that use AI to find and fight cheaters.”

So, what does this mean in practice? Activision said that “cheaters can run and hide but a trail exists,” but what if that trail disappears? That’s where AI-powered behavioral models come into play.

“Cheat developers can’t hide player behavior. How people play – the legit, the phony, the good, and the bad – gives us information and we use that to build ways to pick those bad folks out of a lineup,” Activision explained.

“We already have data from cheaters but to help build out profiles for those God-tier players we examine the data from the Call of Duty League – where every match is recorded, and every stat is preserved.

“There’s more in progress around what we’re doing with AI beyond behavioral models and as work continues, we’ll share what we can.”

As we near Black Ops 6’s release on October 25, Activision has made an ambitious commitment to players: it’s targeting booting cheaters out of Call of Duty within one hour.

“A lot has been put into Black Ops 6 to upgrade security, but here is the goal we’re targeting: we want to catch and remove cheaters within one hour of them being in their first match,” Activision said.

Activision calls this metric ‘Time to Action,’ which it saw (eventually) make a positive impact during Black Ops 6’s beta weekends. It saw that cheaters were able to complete just five matches before being booted out of the game, with 25% of all Weekend Two bans happening during the first match a cheater ever played.

Meanwhile, 12,000 confirmed cheating accounts were stopped before they “ever saw the inside of a match” in the beta, Activision said.

Cheat developers are flawed (clearly – they have to pretend to be good at video games). With this in mind, Black Ops 6 launches with an updated version of the kernel-level driver (this also applies to Warzone), with new machine-learning behavioral systems focused on speed of detection and the analysis of gameplay to combat aim bots in place. Upgrades are set to launch alongside Ranked Play.

“The people behind cheats are organized, illegal groups that pick apart every piece of data within our games to look for some way to make cheating possible,” Activision said. “These bad guys are not just some script kiddies poking around with code they found online. They are a collective who profit from exploiting the hard work of game developers across the industry.

But cheat developers are flawed (clearly – they have to pretend to be good at video games). Every time they cheat, they leave breadcrumbs behind.

“We’re always looking for those breadcrumbs to find the bad actors and get them out of the game.”

For more, we’ve got confirmation of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s launch Multiplayer maps, modes, and Operators, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s preload and global launch times.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].