"opponent AI on"

I was playing a 3v3 matchmaking game, and after a few minutes we saw a light grey quickly fading message something like "an opponent AI has been turned off". Then a player paused, said they needed a minute. They came back, and after a short time, a similar message showed "... opponent AI is on".
What does this mean? Does it mean a player was using a mod, or that one of the opponents was an AI? Perhaps one player is using an AI as support (e.g. doing their eco)?
It was a weird balance game too. One team with 800-1000 people, and the other team had one 1600+, and two lower ranked. Balanced overall, just with 1 ringer player.

Do you have a replay id for me?

My initial guess is that someone is trolling you !

Replay #22800257
The messages say "toggled AI_RunOpponentAI is now off" and "toggled AI_RunOpponentAI is now on". Looking at the replay now, I see the messages came quite a few times. They weren't just 1 message before the pause and another after.
Perhaps that's a game capability I accidentally turned on/off by pressing some keyboard combination? I make quite a few unintended/accidental keyboard presses during a game :-). But it's clear from the chat that I and another player was seeing those notifications at the same time...
Can another player cause light great fast-fading messages like that to appear for all the other players?

I think this might be a hot key combination similar to the cheat menu. Oftentimes in games you'll see it says that a certain player is trying to cheat but all it means is that they're accidentally hitting the key combination that's trying to open the cheat menu for when a person's in sandbox mode playing around. Pretty sure this is similar but don't quote me lol

@Dorset half my hotkeys are attached to debug functions and I hit those all the time by accident. I even tried teleporting (warping) units in some game. It did not work because cheats are disabled. But I did appreciate catching myself trying it when units took too long to get somewhere.

On topic, it is this console command:

And I'm 99.2% certain that the console command is harmless and does not actually do anything in a PvP setting. But I'm happily proven wrong, @Sprouto would you know what this console command changes? Is it functional?

Is that related to the functionality that I think FAF added for having an AI take over an opponent when they disconnect?

It is non-functional as far as I'm aware - at least with LOUD - however, I can attest, than in the days of the stock AI and Sorian - this command did essentially brain-dead the AI. Of course, you might say the vanilla AI, sometimes even with Sorian, was already that way.

@sheikah said in "opponent AI on":

Is that related to the functionality that I think FAF added for having an AI take over an opponent when they disconnect?

No, that was managed via Lua. But I'm not sure if that is functional.