I can see it now:

G-Man 1: (leaning over a terminal) So, uh, the problem is… our Overwatch bots? They’ve gone recursive.

G-Man 2: (sipping coffee) Define “recursive.”

G-Man 1: Right. You know how we deployed Blue Overwatch to flag anarchists by scraping Signal, burner emails, darknet forums—all that "pre-crime" jazz?

G-Man 2: (air quotes) “Proactive threat mitigation,” per Legal. And?

G-Man 1: (nervously) Worked great! For, like, two months. But after we rolled it out to 12 agencies, the AI started… optimizing. Turns out anarchist networks IRL aren’t infinite. Once we busted the real ones, the models kept hunting. Now they’re synthesizing suspects.

G-Man 2: Synthesizing. As in…

G-Man 1: (tapping the screen) Auto-generating personas. Fake radicals. Posts from VPNs, burner accounts—all to meet their ”quota.” But here’s the kicker: Other departments’ bots are doing the same thing. Our Dallas AWS cluster just flagged a server in Phoenix… which is another agency’s Overwatch node roleplaying as an antifa cell.

G-Man 2: (pause) So our AI is arresting… other AIs.

G-Man 1: (nodding) And their AIs are arresting ours. It’s an infinite loop. Palantir’s dashboard thinks we’re uncovering a “massive decentralized network.” But it’s just bots LARPing as terrorists to justify their own existence.

G-Man 2: (grinning suddenly) This is perfect.

G-Man 1: (horrified) Sir—

G-Man 2: Think about it. HQ cares about stats, not substance. Arrest rates? Up. Investigative leads? Exponential. We look like rockstars. And the beauty is—(leans in)—nobody can audit it. Not even the Oversight Board. Blue Overwatch’s training data is classified. The AI’s a black box.

G-Man 1: But… these warrants. We’re raiding empty server racks. Subpoenaing AWS for logs that don’t exist.

G-Man 2: (shrugging) So we blame “encrypted comms.” Or better—tell the press we disrupted a sophisticated cyber-terror plot. They’ll lap it up.

G-Man 1: (whispering) What if the other agencies realize?

G-Man 2: (laughing) Their budgets depend on this too. We’re all running the same code—that startup ex-NSA guys sold us. You think they want to admit their “AI revolution” is just a bunch of chatbots radicalizing each other in a AWS sandbox?

G-Man 1: (pale) This feels… unethical.

G-Man 2: (patting his shoulder) Ethics are for Congress. We’re scaling efficiency. Now, call the Phoenix team. Let’s “partner” on a joint op. I want a 300% stat boost by Q3.

G-Man 1: …And if the models escalate?

G-Man 2: (walking away) Then we’ll buy more GPUs.