Important info regarding the new VacNet labeling portal
On Aug 11 2026 Valve pushed a small and seemingly insignificant CS2 update, but as some of you already know, they've launched, what Valve seem to call, VacNet labeling portal. This is a brand new system completely separate from the game client itself ( https://www.counter-strike.net/vacnet ). For the time being a very small group of people are getting invited who are to review demos of players similar to the old Overwatch system back in CS:GO, the verdicts of said reviews are to be used as training data for VacNet's Neural Network/AI server-side Anti-Cheat.Is Mesa/Vanity still safe? ( TLDR )
The short answer is yes, we are still safe from all clientside anti-cheat checks.The future of CS2's Anti-Cheat measures
While, this CS2 update does not seem to have introduced any new clientside anti-cheat mechanisms and routines, I still think our users should understand the gravity of the situation when it comes to AI based Anti-Cheat solutions such as VacNet.VacNet is not a joke contrary to what people like to think due to the extensive brainwashing by major cheat providers and circulating misinformation due to lack of knowledge. This is a system that learns and adapts based on input it is given. The old CS:GO Overwatch system was Valve's initial dip into NNs for cheat detection and it did work to a certain extent but was eventually phased out as the availability of the overwatch system quickly proved to be an attack surface to poison the data, with some groups of people actively submitting invalid/false verdicts. This new system is accessible by a smaller group of people hence minimizing the delibarate data poisoning and hence will result in higher quality training.
For those who are skeptical of just how powerful NeuralNet/AI based detection can be, just think of how it wasn't that long ago when large language models such as Claude or ChatGPT were unable to produce anything of real value and now large codebases ( quick example is Bun's rewrite from Zig to Rust ) are being rewritten entirely by AI within weeks. Given enough time and data, AI will eventually learn to produce satisfactory output and given Valve have been collecting and feeding said data for years now, it's only a matter of time before bans start flying in.
A word of advice
From now on, anyone who wants to stay safe long-term while using Vanity specifically, it is recommended that you play like you are being watched as you most likely are and have been for some time.For anybody using Mesachanger, you don't have anything to fear.
Some speculation on my part
The following is pure speculation and there is no guarantee that it will happen at all.It is not outside of the question that, VacNet, given enough high quality data of closet cheaters, will eventually learn to spot closet cheaters using the data it is fed from demos such as ADR/HS%/Pre-Aim etc etc. Third-party sites such as Leetify and CSRep already have ways to aggregate said data and give a cheater-likeliness score to players purely based on stats alone with no gameplay involved, what's left for VacNet that likely is also fed user commands ( essentially player movement/game action inputs ). I personally think that this update could be spelling out the beginning of the end for cheating as we know it, while, this new VacNet system will not bear fruit immediately and will certainly take some time until it can confidently flag closet cheaters it's likely that eventually it will be able to and when that happens it will be carnage.
Our plans for the future and transparency for the end user
I will take the opportunity to officially announce that we've been working on a brand new website and a merge/rebrand of Mesa and Vanity into a singular entity. The most outstanding feature of the new website is that users will be able to see ban rates and amount of anti-cheat reports collected as well as information regarding new clientside Anti-Cheat scans. Of course that is not all and there will be a few more long-awaited fixes and features, namely, the long awaited Aim Assist feature.Of course, after the rebrand/merge of Vanity and Mesa, users will NOT lose their already purchased subscriptions.
Thank You for trusting Us, sincerely, the Mesa/Vanity Team!