Since Arc Raiders launched in late October 2025, there's been a growing belief the eponymous drones are actively learning about how players work. Anecdotes have been bandied around of them seemingly becoming smarter about their targeting and movement. Well, sorry to break this to you, but that's just how they've been designed. Virgil Watkins, design director on Arc Raiders, explains this to PC Gamer in a new interview. "That's just us in the way we author them," he says. "The machine learning is literally only for teaching them to walk and navigate the environment. It doesn't do any of their behaviors or their attacks or anything like that." Don't feel too bad if you really did believe the Arcs were starting to cop on to how players operate, as Embark's put some legwork into video game AI. Tom Solberg, a machine learning software engineer at the studio, wrote a pretty in-depth piece once on how this tech is changing how the devs approach movement. "Will this blow up the server?": Arc Raiders players are so good at killing Arc that Embark eyes ways to "escalate" PvE "We can track who shoots first": Arc Raiders design lead says aggression-based matchmaking is "a bit of a misnomer" Arc Raiders lead says a "prominent professor in neurology" encouraged him to submit the extraction shooter to science This, plus numerous incidents of seeing Arcs act in unexpected ways, and you've got the makings of a strong hypothesis. But it appears the team keeps combat and navigation separate, making them disparate wings of the same, terrifying mechanical menace that trawls the map endlessly yearning for your demise. Arc Raiders "needs that element of tension and risk" from PvP to work, dev says, even though Embark knows people are loving its "safer lobbies"