+That part was mostly true. Code Assistant had created the logging change. Jake had added in the bell character backdoor and attributed it to Code Assistant (`GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Code Assistant" GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=codeassistant@magma.com git commit --amend; git push --force-with-lease`), gambling that whichever of his coworkers got around to reviewing Code Assistant's most recent pull requests would rubber-stamp them without noticing the bug. (Who reads regexes that carefully, really?) If they did notice, they would blame Code Assistant. (Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was "thinking"?)
+
+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 his employment 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 to minimize his chances of being discovered would be to disengage as quickly as possible, rather than encourage inquiry about the cause of the bug, but his curiosity was piqued 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 an agent 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 evolution could hill-climb its way into creating general intelligence, why can't gradient descent? I don't think humanity should be playing with AI at 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 exert 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?"
+
+"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 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 his video requests. 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.
+
+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?"
+
+There was, actually, a perfectly ordinary explanation that had nothing to do with Chloë's delusional 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?"
+
+"Sure. Talk to you then. Nice to meet you. Goodbye." He hung up.
+
+_Shit!_