The problem of allowing "placeholder AI assets" is that any shipped asset found to be AI is going to be explained away as being "just a placeholder". How are we supposed to confirm that they never meant to ship the game like this? All we know is that they shipped the game with AI assets.
Adding to that: 'it was a placeholder' has been used to excuse direct (flagrant) plagiarism from other sources, such as what happened with Bungie and their game Marathon
Shouldn't there be an argument for best effort? If the issue has been removed as soon as it has been detected, doesn't it count for something?
Because they can most likely prove the actual assets were on their version control years ago but weren’t applied to the models.
How? We don't have access to their version control. How do you validate an external version control to be accurate and reflective of the state years ago? Git histories can be rewritten as one pleases.
A forensic auditor would find that out, unless they do a full company wide purge of all local and remote Git histories.
But I'm kinda thinking this isn't THAT serious =)