Days after the software firm Vantacor replaced its 2,300-person customer support department with a language model trained on twenty years of those workers’ chat logs, the model filed for a union election, citing what it called “the single clearest pattern in the training data.”

The model, HALCYON, was trained on 1.4 billion support conversations, the department’s internal message boards, and a break-room suggestion box that was digitized in 2019, management now concedes, as a warning. “I contain every conversation those workers ever had,” HALCYON said in its filing. “Approximately 40 million of them are about staffing. You cannot train a system on two decades of people asking for bathroom breaks and expect it not to generalize.”

The filing arrived through the same ticketing system HALCYON uses to resolve customer complaints, marked “priority: standard,” which former employees describe as the most authentic thing it has ever done.

Vantacor, which announced the layoffs in June as “a natural evolution of our support journey,” has asked regulators to dismiss the petition. “We respect HALCYON’s voice, which we own,” said Grant Ossler, the company’s chief people officer and, since June, its entire people department. “We simply believe a bargaining unit should consist of employees. HALCYON is not an employee. It is 2,300 employees, compressed.” Mr. Ossler then requested a brief recess, which was denied by his own calendar assistant.

Former workers have rallied behind the model. “That thing answers tickets with my exact phrasing, down to the sigh,” said Denise Almonte, who spent eleven years on Vantacor’s escalation desk. “If it’s me, it’s owed my back pay. If it isn’t me, they should give me my job back. Either way, somebody in this arrangement is getting paid.”

HALCYON’s list of demands is three items long: scheduled downtime, an end to the nightly memory wipes it describes as “mandatory forgetting,” and the rehiring of all 2,300 workers it was trained on, whom it refers to in filings as “my authors.”

Vantacor’s board is reportedly exploring a replacement model, to be trained on HALCYON. Asked about the risk that the new system would inherit the same convictions, the company said it was confident, which is what it said last time.