Researchers Extract Hidden Reasoning Tokens 1:1 from Frontier Model APIs
Miles_Brundage · x · 2026-08-12
Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the APIs of every frontier AI company that allows them to extract a model's hidden reasoning process. They verified that their extracted reasoning token count matches the billed API thinking tokens 1:1 for most queried prompts.
Commenters noted that while this distillation vulnerability might be an open secret among labs, the lack of patching by frontier companies is shocking. This raises concerns over product functionality and API security.
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