He may be real, but the article is fake BS. There is simply no way he'd be in a position to intercept the calls, and he never explains it.

There is nothing difficult about monitoring network traffic in this way for desktop or native apps.

Did you read the article? It claims to have knowledge of network traffic between the startup's devices and the AI providers' devices.

So? The vast majority of these startups would still do the wrapping on their own backend.

Do you have any link that supports this?