The most charitable interpretation is that they're admitting they failed, but saying where they failed is in basic due diligence of looking at the output of run

The most charitable interpretation is that they're admitting they failed, but saying where they failed is in basic due diligence of looking at the output of running the algorithm. And that they're claiming that, if they had done so, they wouldn't have been OK with it either. It's sort of like saying, "That's definitely a bug. It was unacceptable for me to put my code into production without ever testing it, and for that I take the blame. But I assure you that I did not intentionally write code designed to delete everyone's data." Obviously this may or may not be what happened. It may even be what they're pretending happened.