meat proxy
/MEET PROK-see/noun
Meaning
A person who acts as an unthinking relay between an AI system and another person by forwarding AI-generated text, code, advice, or other material without reading, understanding, checking, or meaningfully editing it. The term is usually a humorous but pointed criticism of someone who adds their name while leaving the real work of interpretation to the recipient.[1][2][4]
- 1. A person who copies an AI chatbot's response directly into a message, email, post, or group chat.
- 2. A developer or coworker who submits AI-generated code, documentation, or review comments without inspecting or taking responsibility for the result.
- 3. By extension, the behavior of using a human intermediary to relay an AI's output instead of communicating a considered conclusion.
Examples
“Please summarize it first—I don't need another meat proxy in Slack.”
“He pasted the entire chatbot answer into the PR. Absolute meat proxy behavior.”
“I used AI to draft the response, but I read and rewrote it; that's not meat proxy behavior.”
“That email has three paragraphs of polished nothing. Did a meat proxy send this?”
“Being a meat proxy isn't the same as using AI; it's refusing to review what you send.”
Origin and spread
The expression is a compound built around the human sense of meat found in internet terms such as meatspace and the computing term proxy, an intermediary that forwards requests or responses. The earliest located matching use is a March 31, 2026 post titled “meat-based llm proxies,” which described people sending an LLM's responses to others and called the recipient's experience communicating with the model “via a meat proxy.” Developer Niklas Gruhn gave the shorter label prominent circulation in his August 3, 2026 essay “Don't be a meat proxy,” about unreviewed AI output in Slack, pull requests, and group chats. The available record supports Gruhn as an important popularizer, but does not establish that he originated the phrase.[1]
How to use it
Meat proxy is informal, sarcastic, and usually pejorative. It is most at home in technology, workplace, developer, and group-chat contexts. It criticizes unreviewed relay, not AI use itself: someone who uses AI but checks the result, adds context, and writes in their own words is not normally being called a meat proxy. Because the label can sound personal or insulting, it works best as self-deprecating humor or among people who already share the joke.
Sources
- 1. Niklas Gruhn — Don't be a meat proxySupports: meaning, origin.
- 2. not-an-llm — meat-based llm proxiesSupports: meaning.
- 3. Preply — Top slang phrases & statistics for 2026
- 4. Lobsters — Don't be a meat proxySupports: meaning.
- 5. Cambridge English Dictionary — meatspaceSupports: form.
- 6. MDN Web Docs — Proxy serverSupports: form.
