On May 15, 2025, a graphic artist named Antireal accused Bungie of stealing digital artwork originally uploaded to her Twitter account in 2017 for use in Marathon, posting three comparison images including an in-game texture with a partly erased artist signature. This, coming after multiple plagiarism controversies in Destiny 2 and Bungie's ineffectiveness in addressing the practice, drew widespread criticism from players. The same day, the game's development team issued a response confirming that a former Bungie employee included the designs on a texture sheet, and that they had reached out to Antireal to negotiate how to resolve the controversy. During a livestream the following day, game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joseph Cross asserted that the plagiarism was only restricted to certain in-game assets, and that they were conducting a full review to determine if any more were used without credit. It was pointed out that Cross and other Bungie employees had followed her Twitter account for "a few years" before this controversy; Antireal claimed she had no prior communication with them. Around the same time, a 2024 tweet was rediscovered where she revealed that she had hidden references to "Loss", a 2007 four-panel strip from the webcomic "Ctrl+Alt+Del" that became a meme, in her illustrations as early as 2018. Another user replied with an in-game Marathon screenshot of a whiteboard and a Loss meme drawn in marker, but Antireal did not bring this up in the original accusations and did not confirm if this version of Loss was the one she used. In December 2025, Antireal announced that the negotiations were "resolved to my satisfaction", and she appeared in the game's credits as a visual design consultant.