Nexus Mods, the largest modding repository in PC gaming, is making AI disclosure mandatory for new uploads. Anyone publishing a mod from now on has to declare "whether AI has been used in their work". Mods tagged as "AI-assisted" must additionally carry "a public explanation of how and where AI was used", and the AI tags will be made more prominent on mod pages.
The announcement comes from site owner Victor "Foledinho" Folmann, who took over the platform from its founder in 2025, in a longer post about AI-generated content. His reasoning is notably unsentimental: "One of the most consistent concerns we've heard is that it's not clearly disclosed when AI has been used to create a mod," he writes. "We already have tags for AI-generated and AI-assisted mods, but we recognise that there's a lot more we can do to make that information more accessible and clear for you all."
There will be no ban — and Folmann makes the argument from the tools' ubiquity: "AI is currently used throughout the whole process of creation, from script autocompletion to generation of textures, voices, and full assets, and it is difficult to draw a clear boundary between what is acceptable and unacceptable. An outright ban will not eliminate AI from the modding process but will prevent people from mentioning its use. We'd prefer the opposite; it should be out in the open, clearly labelled, and regulated according to the rules that we can implement on our platform."
Two commitments come with it: Nexus Mods says it will not use mods to train AI, and will not sell or license them to anyone who does. The platform announced earlier this year that SteamDB had joined Nexus Mods, and it has spent 2026 marking 25 years online — a quarter century in which the site's identity has been defined largely by the work of its mod authors.
Why it matters: Modding is a testbed for how AI labelling actually works in practice, because everything in it runs on reputation and provenance. Nexus is choosing the path the big platforms are choosing: not bans, but metadata and visibility. Whether that is enough depends on details the post leaves open — what happens to existing mods, how violations are enforced, and whether a self-written explanation is checkable at all.
What to watch: whether other asset repositories follow. Anyone hosting textures, voice lines and game assets for a living is sitting on exactly the data that creatives are currently loudest about protecting from unasked-for AI training.
