Researchers Extract Hidden Reasoning Traces from Frontier Models via API Vulnerability
dair_ai · x · 2026-08-12
Researchers have discovered a method to extract the hidden reasoning traces of frontier AI models by exploiting a vulnerability in the APIs of major AI companies.
They verified that the extracted reasoning token count matches the billed API thinking tokens 1:1 for most queried prompts. This suggests that distilling reasoning traces may have been possible for a long time without ever breaking the cryptography.
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