Researchers Extract Hidden AI Reasoning Traces, Suspect Chinese Models Distilled from GPT and Claude
willknight · x · 2026-08-12
Researchers have discovered a way to extract the hidden "reasoning traces" from frontier AI models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini.
- Security Vulnerability: The method could recover personal information such as passwords and API keys from a model's inner reasoning. This vulnerability has since been patched.
- Distillation Evidence: The study found that the open-weight Chinese model Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI produces outputs strikingly similar to the hidden reasoning traces of Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.6 Sol. This suggests some Chinese AI models may be trained by distilling reasoning information from leading US models, although it doesn't mean the model is entirely copied.
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