Meat proxy
What it is
A meat proxy is a person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output to a colleague without reading, understanding, or checking it first — adding nothing to the exchange but latency, the way a proxy server relays a request unchanged. It's used as a criticism: being called a meat proxy means you let a chatbot answer on your behalf and passed the reply along verbatim.
Why it's emerging now
As AI-assisted replies became routine in Slack threads, pull requests, and group chats, teams started noticing a specific failure mode: not that AI output is bad, but that a human relayed it without adding judgment. Developer Niklas Gruhn named the pattern in an August 3, 2026 essay after repeatedly receiving unread chatbot answers from coworkers; the term gave a name to friction people were already feeling but hadn't labeled.
How it relates to what you know
It's the receiving-end counterpart to concerns the field already has language
for on the generating end — hallucination covers when a model is wrong, and
guardrails covers stopping bad output before it ships, but neither addresses
a human passing along unverified AI output as if it were their own
judgment. It's a sibling term to "workslop" (Sept. 2025, Stanford/BetterUp),
which named AI-generated work that looks polished but lacks substance — meat
proxy instead names the person who skips verification, not the output
itself.