Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

stolen-thoughts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 325 posts

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#131

Post by breezybottom »

Perseids wrote: post #104
niemandhier wrote: post #59

You cannot steal what is not owned. At least in the EU there is no copyright for LLM outputs, so I guess all they might do is violate the terms of service.

I think they are doing us a disservice by perpetuating this focus on intellectual "property" [1] in regard to AI. The real issue with Anthropic, OpenAI etc. is not that they have used all of our public knowledge for training their LLMs. Creating new work from old and learning from prior generations is what we all do. The issue is that they want to claim all of the benefits for themselves. They are standing on the sho…

That is the issue, you just rephrased it to sound softer (public knowledge isn't a legal term). Fair use law isn't supposed to apply to commercial activity. So it is absolutely about using copyrighted work for LLM training.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#132

Post by breezybottom »

Zambyte wrote: post #127
otterley wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing is not a word that applies only to physical objects.

Please provide an example of an action legally considered "stealing" that does not involve stealing physical objects.

Digital piracy is considered stealing in most countries.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#133

Post by agenticfish »

elzbardico wrote: post #57

OpenAI and Anthropic will probably now resort to save this server side, instead of relying on encription to be able to keep state on the client.

That's not a trivial thing to do for them because they offer zero data retention environments to enterprise clients.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#135

Post by yetanotherjosh »

vinaigrette wrote: post #33

I must say right of the bat this is the best research paper/working paper in regards to its styling. Beautiful

My brain can't tell if the text is horizontal or slightly rotated. It's very hard to read. Beautiful to some, inaccessible to others.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#136

Post by Zambyte »

breezybottom wrote: post #132
Zambyte wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide an example of an action legally considered "stealing" that does not involve stealing physical objects.

Digital piracy is considered stealing in most countries.

Source please.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#137

Post by Zambyte »

otterley wrote: post #130
Zambyte wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By conflating unauthorized copying with stealing, they're usually doing so to justify excessive punishment. If the owner lost what they had, they were obviously harmed, right?

Property rights are about control, not about physical objects. Never has been. By committing copyright infringement, trespassing, or, yes, stealing, you're asserting for yourself the privilege to take something that doesn't belong to you (exclusive control) from someone else.

Legally speaking, is murder stealing?

(And yes, "legally" matters, because we're talking about laws in this thread, not colloquial "their life was stolen" type expressions.)

This question is obviously (hopefully) rhetorical, no need to answer. My point is that different crimes are different. Otherwise literally every crime is stealing, and no other words for different crimes matter. Obviously different crimes are different.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#138

Post by Aissen »

"Stealing" something you already paid for (tokens), but that you can't have access to(!). And trained on the sum of human knowledge.

Training on other model outputs ought to be business as usual, stop using morally charged terms made up by future monopolists: https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-06-15-rl-economic...

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#139

Post by dboreham »

desterothx wrote: post #63
dboreham wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, ok. So the attack doesn't involve decrypting the payload, only getting the server to do so. Since a model will do that if you just ask, what's so special about the attack?

The large models whose thinking traces are useful are safeguarded against this reasoning replaying. the small models are just designed for speed and efficiency, so these safeguards are a lot meaker, making the attack possible

I guess someone forgot to salt the encryption scheme with a meakness factor.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#140

Post by dboreham »

happybox2016 wrote: post #28

The real issue is that API providers log everything. OpenAI/Anthropic already capture full CoT traces in their logs — they just don't expose them. Distillation via API is just making explicit what they already have.

The whole point of the encrypted payload returned to the client for future re-submission would be that they don't log.
Post reply on HN