Are you a ‘meat proxy’?

If you send unreviewed AI outputs to your coworkers, this new insult may apply to you

MANY READERS WILL remember the arrival of the term ‘clanker’ onto the scene last year, a term that referred broadly to LLMs and other chatbot-esque features of digital life. You might also remember ‘workslop’ showing up to refer to work product that was mindlessly taken out of an LLM without much revision.

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Now into this arena enters a new term, meant to denigrate those coworkers who just can’t stop copy-pasting whatever their AI agent of choice is spitting out to them, and then calling it work.

Meet the meat proxies. The term blew up this month in tech and white-collar circles to describe a certain type of coworker. As the San Francisco Field Guide defined it, a meat proxy is simply “a person who forwards AI-generated text, code or other output without reading, understanding or validating it,” acting “only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.”

One difference between the term meat proxy and clanker or workslop is it is not part of the AI versus anti-AI camps, at least not the same way the term clanker seemed to be. Rather, the term seems to be coming from within the AI user camp, aimed at people who are using AI rather…uncritically.

“Please don’t do this,” wrote Niklas Gruhn, credited as the inventor of the term, referring to the times he had received verbatim output from someone. “I mean, I’ve done this. But I’ve been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value. I can talk to Claude myself. It’s going to be faster. I don’t need a meat proxy in between.”

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The point Gruhn is trying to make isn’t to debate AI use, but to point out that now that it’s easy to access it, that some human cognition should be kept in the loop. Some even went so far as to call being a meat proxy the “biggest career risk” of 2026.

“Meat proxies don’t use their own judgement. They defer all decisions and taste to the AI,” tweeted developer Cory House. “Sure, use AI. But don’t overdo it. Be human.” Kieran Delamont