Tung Tung Tung Sahur is the biggest name to come out of the AI brainrot craze, a humanoid kentongan popular enough to land his own Fortnite skin. So why did he vanish from the Steal a Brainrot, a popular Roblox game that made him famous? And who actually owns him?
Tung Tung Tung Sahur is based on a popular Muslim tradition where people carrying a drum-like instrument, bang them in the middle of the night before Sahur, the pre-dawn meal eaten before the daily fast during Ramadan. The custom itself is actually not as scary as the Tung Tung Tung Sahur meme, but the idea of the humanoid kentongan smacking you with his wooden bat if you don’t wake up is what made it popular.
The popularity peaked in 2025 when Tung Tung Sahur was added to Roblox game Steal a Brainrot, which is the only Roblox game ever to hit 25 million concurrent players. The game contains hundreds of brainrot memes, but in late 2025, Tung Tung Sahur suddenly vanished from the game.
Now players are finally learning about an ongoing custody battle over the game between the creators of Steal a Brainrot, and Mementum Lab, a company that claims to own the copyright and trademark rights to Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
Why was Tung Tung Tung Sahur removed from Steal a Brainrot?
The first disappearance of Tung Tung Tung Sahur happened in September 2025, when Mementum Lab sent Steal a Brainrot’s creators a cease-and-desist letter. Mementum claimed to be the “the exclusive rights holder” of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and said the character was protected under copyright, trademark, and unfair competition law. The letter threatened legal action and a DMCA takedown if the game didn’t stop using him.
After the note, the developers pulled Tung Tung Tung Sahur from the game and spent the next few months trying to negotiate a licensing deal with Mementum. But the two sides couldn’t agree on terms, and by November 2025, talks had completely stalled.
The developers then filed a federal lawsuit asking a court to rule that Mementum doesn’t actually hold a valid copyright over Tung Tung Sahur, since he was AI-generated and, under US and Indonesian law, AI-made content likely isn’t eligible for copyright protection. At the same time, they put Tung Tung Tung Sahur back into the game without Mementum’s permission.
In April 2026, Mementum went after the character a second time, but instead of a US copyright claim, they used a European law, the EU’s Digital Services Act, to file a takedown with Roblox. This time they cited a registered French trademark on Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s name and image. Roblox complied, and the character was removed from the game again.
So Tung Tung Sahur has technically vanished from Steal a Brainrot twice: once voluntarily, in response to legal threats, and once by force, thanks to a European trademark takedown.
Who created Tung Tung Sahur?
According to Mementum Labs, Tung Tung Sahur was created by an Indonesian content creator Noxa who is affiliated with Mementum Labs.
Tung Tung Sahur appeared on the internet as one of the many AI-generated memes, which explains why few ever wondered who created Tung Tung Sahur. It was essentially created by AI, but now Mementum Labs has calimed that the meme actually has a human creator behind it who used an “artistic process” to bring Tung Tung Sahur to life.
Spyder Games and Speedy Simulator Gaming aren’t disputing that a person typed a prompt somewhere along the way. Their complaint leans on a string of court rulings that say that copyright only protects work made by a human. They point to Naruto v. Slater, the case about a monkey who snapped a selfie with a photographer’s camera, where courts ruled the monkey couldn’t hold a copyright because it wasn’t human.
Mementum, however, argues that Noxa put their own creative work into crafting the character’s backstory, voice work, and other attributes, making it eligible for licensing.
It’s worth noting that the company has already licensed Tung Tung Tung Sahur to bigger gaming names like Fortnite.
Can you copyright AI-generated brainrot?
The lawsuit now has people questioning whether AI art can be copyrighted, especially given that the legal question really depends on the region where it’s being asked. In the United States and Indonesia, AI-generated content typically cannot be copyrighted.
Mementum Labs argues that AI-generated content should not be dismissed as “fleeting viral content,” insisting it requires “genuine, structured creative” work to become a fully realized character.
Tung Tung Tung Sahur was generated by AI, but the character’s backstory had more human influence. It draws on a niche tradition that takes actual cultural knowledge to even reference. Someone knew what Sahur was, what a kentongan looked like, and why banging one in the middle of the night meant something, and how to make sense of that.
There’s also a conceptual leap of humanizing the object itself, giving a kentongan a face, a body, a personality, which is a creative decision. Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s given voice is now also recognizable to fans, and has also gone viral. These are some of the elements Mementum Labs will put forward to justify its claim, though it must still work against the basic fact of Tung Tung Tung Sahur originally being AI-generated.
Both sides are set to argue this out at a hearing on September 16, 2026, where a judge will decide whether the case moves forward toward a full copyright ruling, or gets dismissed before that question ever gets answered.
