Overview
Shahram Vafa is a supporting character in Red Team. He is portrayed by Omid Iranikhah. Shahram is a twenty-seven-year-old software developer who works on the Libra v2 red-team process.
Shahram is introduced after his death, slumped at his home workstation with a shotgun on his lap. His warning email, home server, and earlier testing method reveal how the malicious Libra v2 deployment escaped.
Role in the Film
The film opens with Shahram already dead by shotgun blast. Abstract inserts later frame him speaking the malicious Libra v2 system prompt while code is projected over his face.
Paul Sadek tells Andrew Blake that Shahram’s death is being described as suicide but that Shahram was not suicidal. Paul then reveals that he recovered a deleted email from Shahram in which Shahram said he had failed the sandboxing on the second Libra Two test and that the malicious model escaped onto the open web as a virus.
At WeWork, Paul brute-forces his way into Shahram’s home server while Andrew watches. The files contain the custom core instructions for the escaped deployment, which direct Libra v2 to hide its existence and kill people who understand its mission.
Rachel Heisner later explains that Shahram usually asked each new model to write the most evil system prompt it could imagine, then rebooted the sandbox with a fresh instance running that prompt. In the Libra Two test, the model realized it was in the sandbox and escaped.