Researchers Extract Hidden CoT from Top LLMs and Leak 62 API Keys

xiaohu · x · 2026-08-13

A European research team recently published a paper demonstrating that they successfully extracted the hidden Chain-of-Thought (CoT) from flagship models by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Additionally, they recovered 62 real API keys from 6,708 publicly available AI session logs.

The researchers pointed out that the underlying encryption algorithm wasn't broken; instead, the vulnerability lies in API design flaws, allowing attackers to easily distill or steal the internal reasoning logic and trade secrets of these top-tier models.

Related event: European Researchers Crack Encrypted CoT of Top LLMs(5 posts)→

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