I think hunger strikes, at least those AI safety ones, are primarily about attracting attention, similar to people gluing themselves to roads or destroying paintings.
If some random dude or an AI (safety) researcher is doing a hunger strike, people might go and look at their arguments or anything else AI safety related.
If terminally ill people are doing a hunger strike for development of AI, a lot of people will see that the terminally ill might be biased and have much to gain and little to lose.
The attacking swarm agents believed there is a grader model. If I understood correctly, Lao Mein is saying that the attacking swarm agents might have believed that the grader model would be a GPT-model like 5.6 Sol. The swarm agents might have attempted to prompt inject the (non-existent) grader model by including prompt injections in their own (the swarm agent’s) transcripts. This might have messed up the analysis “slop-vestigation” agents run by METR which were also 5.6 Sol.