The author mentions that she tried to get an explanation for how the models identified her and got nonsense, but I'd be curious what the CoT looked like. Surely that'd be a little more accurate in showing how the LLM arrived as its conclusion, rather than asking it after-the-fact.

FWIW, with a prompt that says something like "vibes only, just give me a name without thinking", Opus 4.7 non-thinking emits exactly two words naming me fairly reliably, so there's no CoT at all to analyze in that case.

CoT is (nearly) hidden with Opus 4.7, in that they get Haiku to summarize the CoT. It’s pretty useless now, so this type of info is now inaccessible to us mortals (unless you call sales).