OpenAI Paid-User Opt-Out May Not Cover Hidden Reasoning Tokens
logisbase2 · reddit · 2026-09-11
A user analysis of OpenAI's terms argues the paid opt-out from training may not cover hidden reasoning tokens.
Key points:
- The terms say users own and are responsible for "Output," conditioned on receiving it — but consumers never receive hidden reasoning tokens, so it's unclear whether they qualify as protected Output.
- Reasoning contains a lightly processed version of everything useful for training, including user input and returned output. If usable, it could feed synthetic data generation or even pretraining/midtraining mixes, making the current guarantee somewhat vacuous.
- By contrast, OpenAI's API agreement and Anthropic's terms don't condition opt-out protection on the user "receiving" the Output.
- Even if OpenAI doesn't apply RL optimization pressure on CoT, using reasoning tokens as training data wouldn't conflict with that promise.
Related event: Researcher Finds Loophole in OpenAI's Training Opt-Out Terms(3 posts)→
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