Bungie's leadership says they didn't know that it happened, and I believe them. In a big studio like Bungie, there are literally hundreds of developers creating and modifying assets dozens of times on a daily basis. There is no way for any human to audit every single asset checked in to the depot against the sum total of the internet, especially when we're trying to keep things under wraps before the game is ready to be announced. Game devs don't have the kind of software tools that Youtube does to police for bad actors uploading copyrighted material.

When individual actors do this, they don't tell their bosses that they've stolen other peoples' work. They hide it and pass the work off as their own and hope nobody notices. This behavior is never condoned or encouraged by leadership because it causes nothing but a big mess for everyone involved if it gets found out. The bigger the team, the more likely somebody will notice this kind of thing. However, it isn't 100% for the same reason that players find bugs that QA missed - when a game goes public, there's often several orders of magnitude more eyes looking at it than internally. More eyeballs looking mean that it is more likely that stolen assets get found out.

After such things happen, the studio's legal representation invariably does reach out to the legally injured party (in this case Antireal) with a settlement offer. Such offers usually include a non-disclosure agreement and a non-disparagement clause in exchange for payment and either a license for the art or removal of all offending assets from the game. That is likely what is going on right now between Bungie and Antireal.

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