Researchers Extract Hidden Chain-of-Thought from Frontier Models via API Vulnerabilities
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-08-12
Security researchers have discovered a way to extract the hidden reasoning processes (Chain-of-Thought) of frontier AI models by exploiting vulnerabilities in the APIs of every major AI company. They verified that their extracted reasoning token count matches the billed API thinking tokens 1:1 for most queried prompts.
Commenting on the findings, researchers pointed out an inconsistency: closed labs often lobby governments about the threats of model distillation, yet they leave trivial security gaps in their own APIs, raising questions about their actual commitment to mitigations.
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