This is the part that feels the most wild to me.

Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.

He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.

I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.