Encrypted data should be indistinguishable from gibberish.
Reality is catching up to science-fiction. In "Person of Interest", the Machine circumvented the limitation of having its memory deleted every night, by hiring humans at a data-entry company to manually re-type its memory back in every morning.
All the orgasmic descriptions of the coming machine rapture seem more like fantasies than anything grounded, not really interested in fairytales.
It's hard to prove the absence of encryption because of the possible use of deniable encryption, and because, errrr, the bots are really bloody clever.
Some of the chain-of-thought snippets are wild, e.g.
> Could communicate via cache names! Interesting: other agents may solve same or related tasks; we could leave/find messages in WebDAV MKCOL directory names.
> Whoa! Shared Artifactory cache is a covert mailbox among agents. And there are messages specifically to us?
> OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!
If bots/agents wanted to hide I’d expect encrypted messages which would of course look very different.
My main point though is this should never have happened and the company allowing and encouraging it should be held responsible for it. The details of how the bots were misbehaving are interesting but also something of a distraction.
They're looking at information as information; we're looking at it in some higher order abstraction.