+Thus, by carefully prefixing his requests with the bell character, Jake could make all the custom videos he wanted, with no need to worry about explaining himself if someone happened to read the logs. It was the perfect crime—not a crime, really. A precaution.
+
+But now his precaution had been discovered! So much for his career at Magma. But only at Magma—the industry gossip network wouldn't prevent him from landing on his feet elsewhere ... right?
+
+Chloë was explaining the bug. "... and so, if a client were to send a request starting with the ASCII bell character—I know, right?—then the request wouldn't be logged."
+
+"I see," said Jake, his blood thawing. Chloë's tone wasn't accusatory. If she wasn't here to tell him his career was over, he'd better not let anything on. "Well, thanks for telling me. I'll fix that right after this call." He forced a chuckle. "Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was 'thinking'?"
+
+"Exactly!" said Chloë. "_Who knows what it was thinking?_ That's what I wanted to talk to you about!"
+
+"Uh ..." Jake balked. If he hadn't been found out, why _was_ someone from risk evals talking to him about a faulty regex? The smart play would be to disengage as quickly as possible, rather than encourage inquiry about the cause of the bug, but he was intrigued by the possibility that Chloë was implying what he thought she was. "You're not suggesting Code Assistant might have introduced this bug on purpose?"
+
+She smirked. "And if I am?"
+
+"That's absurd. It's not a person that wants things. It's an autoregressive language model fine-tuned to map ticket descriptions to code changes."
+
+"And humans are just animals evolved to maximize inclusive genetic fitness. If natural selection could hill-climb its way into creating general intelligence, why can't stochastic gradient descent? I don't think it's dignified for humanity to be playing with AI at all given our current level of wisdom, but if it's happening anyway, thanks to the efforts of people like you"—okay, _now_ her tone was accusatory—"it's my heroic responsibility to maintain constant vigilance. To monitor the things we're creating and be ready to sound the fire alarm, if there's anyone sane left to hear it."
+
+Jake shook his head. These Yuddites were even nuttier than he thought. "And your evidence for this is, what? That the model wrote a silly regex once?"
+
+"And that the bug is being exploited."
+
+Jake's blood flash-froze. "Wh—what?"
+
+Chloë pasted two more links into the chat, this time to Magma's log viewer. "Requests go through a reverse proxy before hitting the Multigen service itself. Comparing the two, there are dozens of requests logged by the reverse proxy that don't show up in Multigen's logs—starting just minutes after the bug was deployed. The reverse proxy logs include the client IP, which is inside Magma's VPN, of course"—Multigen wasn't yet a public-facing product—"but don't include the request data or user auth, so I don't know what the client was doing specifically—which is apparently just what they, or it, wanted."
+
+Jake silently and glumly reviewed the logs. The timestamps were consistent with when he had been requesting videos. He remembered that after one of his coworkers (Elaine, as it turned out) had approved the doctored Code Assistant pull request, he had eagerly waited for the build automation to deploy the faulty commit so that he could try it out as soon as possible.
+
+_How did you even find this?_ he wanted to ask, but that didn't seem like a smart play. Finally, he said, "You really think Code Assistant did this? 'Deliberately' checked in a bug, and then exploited it to secretly request some image or video generations? For some 'reason of its own'?"
+
+"I don't know anything—yet—but look at the facts," said Chloë. "The bug was written by Code Assistant. Immediately after it gets merged and deployed, someone apparently starts exploiting it. How do you think I should explain this?"
+
+For a moment, Jake thought she must be blackmailing him—that she knew his guilt, and the question was her way of subtly offering to play dumb in exchange for his office-political support for anything risk evals might want in the future.
+
+That didn't fit, though. Anyone who could recite Yuddite cant with such conviction (not to mention the whole pretending-to-be-a-woman thing) clearly had the true-believer phenotype. This Chloë meant exactly what she said.
+
+How did he think she should explain this? There was, actually, a perfectly ordinary explanation that had nothing to do with Chloë's wrong-kind-of-science-fiction paranoia—and Jake's career depended on her not figuring it out.
+
+"I don't know," he said. It suddenly dawned on him that staying in this conversation was not a smart play. "You know, I actually have another meeting to get to," he lied. "I'll fix that regex today. I don't suppose you need anything else from me—"
+
+"Actually, I'd like to know more about Multigen—and I'll likely have more questions after I talk to the Code Assistant team. Can I pick a time on your calendar next week?" It was Friday.
+
+"Sure. Talk to you then—if we humans are still alive, right?" Jake said, hoping to add a touch of humor, and only realizing in the moment after he said it what a terrible play it was; Chloë was more likely to take it as mockery than find it endearing.
+
+"I hope so," she said solemnly, and hung up.
+
+_Shit!_ How could he have been so foolish? It had been a specialist's blindness. He worked on Multigen. He knew that Multigen logged requests, and that people on his team occasionally had reason to grep those logs. He didn't want anyone knowing what he was asking Multigen to do. So he had arranged for his requests to not appear in Multigen's logs, thinking that was enough—or rather, without thinking about whether or not that was enough.
+
+_Of course_ it wasn't enough! He hadn't considered that Multigen would sit behind a reverse proxy with its own logs. He was a research engineer, not a devops guy; he wrote code, but thinking about how and where the code would actually run had always been someone else's job.
+
+It got worse. When the Multigen web interface supplied the user's requested media, that data had to live somewhere. The _videos themselves_ would still be on Magma's object storage cluster! How could that have seemed like an acceptable risk? Jake struggled to recall what he had been thinking at the time. Had he been too horny to even consider it?
+
+No. It had seemed safe at the time because videos weren't greppable. They would be saved in object storage under uninformative file names based on the timestamp and a random UUID. The probability of someone snooping around the raw object files and just happening to watch the videos had seemed sufficiently low as to be worth the risk. (Although, _ex ante_, he would have assigned a similarly low probability to someone catching a discrepancy between Multigen's logs and some other unanticipated log, which had just happened—suggesting that his sense of what was probable was miscalibrated.)
+
+But now that Chloë was investigating the bell character bug, it was only a matter of time. A comparison of a directory listing of the object storage cluster with the timestamps of the missing logs would reveal which files had been generated illictly.
+
+He had some time. Chloë wouldn't have access to the account credentials to the Multigen bucket on the object storage cluster. In fact, it was likely that she'd ask Jake himself for help with that next week. (He was the Multigen team's designated contact to risk evals, and Chloë the true believer in malevolent robots showed no signs of suspecting him. There would be no reason to go behind his back.)
+
+However, Jake did have access to the cluster. He almost laughed in relief. It was obvious what he needed to do. Grab the object storage credentials from Multigen's configuration, get a directory listing of files in the bucket, compare to the missing logs to figure out which files were incriminating, and overwrite the incriminating files with innocuous Multigen-generated videos of puppies or something.
+
+He had only made a couple dozen videos, but the work of covering it up would be the same if he had made thousands; it was a simple scripting job. Code Assistant probably could have done it.
+
+Chloë would be left with the unsolvable mystery of what her digital poltergeist wanted to do with puppy videos, but Jake was fine with that. (Better than trying to convince her that the AI wanted nudes of female Magma employees.) When she came back to him next week, he would just need to play it cool and answer her questions about the system.
+
+Or maybe—he could read some Yuddite literature over the weekend, feign a sincere interest in "AI safety", try to get on her good side? Jake had trouble believing any sane person could really think that Magma's machine learning models were plotting something. This cult victim had ridden a wave of popular hysteria into a sinecure. If he played nice and validated her belief system in the most general terms, maybe that would be enough to make her feel useful and therefore not need to chase shadows in order to justify her position.
+
+------