Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#141

Post by otterley » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #137

otterley wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

IAAL but this is not legal advice.

In most U.S. states, the actual crime will be a specific reference to a section in a Penal Code (or, for Federal crimes, the U.S. Code). For civil actions, it's likely to be a reference to a common-law tort, or some Federal statute providing a private right of civil action.

In the case of taking a physical object from someone else, most states call it "theft" in the penal code, or "conversion" for the common-law tort.

But all of this is academic anyway. I'm not entirely sure what your point is.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#142

Post by qwytw » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

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.

It's doublespeak. You don't have to perpetuate it.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#143

Post by Zambyte » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #141

Zambyte wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

IAAL but this is not legal advice. In most U.S. states, the actual crime will be a specific reference to a section in a Penal Code (or, for Federal crimes, the U.S. Code). For civil actions, it's likely to be a reference to a common-law tort, or some Federal statute providing a private right of civil action. In the case of taking a physical object from someone else, most states call it "theft" in the penal code, or "…

> I'm not entirely sure what your point is.

I edit my reply as you were responding to make my point explicit.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#144

Post by infecto » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:04 PM UTC

Wouldn’t the fix be to encrypt before the api call hits the LLM? You would encrypt/decrypt at a separate layer than the LLM. I am sure i am missing something but would love to be educated.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#145

Post by qwytw » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #120

margalabargala wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any word can be applied to any concept with any meaning thanks to the fluidity of vernacular. Language is all just sounds and markings. Anything can be redefined to mean anything, and anyone can decide to aggressively assert their preferred definition of a word.

Words can change meaning, but whether or not they actually do is a social function of how they are observably used. Words can also have multiple meanings concurrently. When it comes to the word "steal" in these discussions, people generally are arguing past each other in regards to the single definition they're thinking of. Of course, you can assert that the meaning of "steal" only applies to physical items. You are…

I agree, someone certainly has the right to have an incorrect understanding of that the word "wrong" means.

To be fair when someone tries to shift the meaning of words everyone doesn't just have to go with it to appease the large corporations trying to do that. I of course don't mean intellectual property rights or copyright infringement, you can perhaps apply the word "steal" there, not when talking about LLM traces which are currently legally uncopyrightable, though. Unless we're actually talking about someone breaking into Anthropic's servers and stealing their files, then again... if you do that you can always just blame the LLM you used.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#146

Post by qwytw » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #88

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.

While I feel it is morally OK for users to access the metadata of their own exchanges, there's something awry with that formulation, (not-)"stealing" is about more than just copyright or ToS. For example, consider my browser cookies that authenticate me to HN right now. Nobody even wants to copyright them, but if you were to somehow acquire a copy I'd very much consider it "stealing."

If someone acquired a copy of them by breaking into your device and stealing the files sure. If you consciously sent them out to every person who asked for them (even if in their encrypted form) well.. that's a choice you made.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#147

Post by bob1029 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

I am slowly turning around on the idea of opaque reasoning tokens.

In principle, yes, I want total control and visibility into the reasoning process.

In practice, I find that it takes up so much time to DIY reasoning agents that I can't spend much energy on the actual application.

The model providers have way more resources and talent to do this right and keep it right over time. I am willing to concede this moat to them if it means I can actually focus on the business.

The more I think about it, the less I care to see those tokens. It feels an awful lot like obsession over logging every trace item an application could produce. Useful in theory but a nasty garage stacked to the ceiling with useless shit otherwise. What nefarious things are we concerned with? That they burn too many tokens in the black box? I'll threaten to move to a different black box. There are always options in a market with this many participants and big players feel this pressure. They know there's a point at which being evil bastards is no longer profitable.

Spending time carefully designing tools and views that interact with the environment in clean ways is a much better investment than trying to own and control 100% of the reasoning process or models.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#148

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

Aissen wrote: post #138

"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...

[deleted]

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#149

Post by qwytw » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

myworkaccount2 wrote: post #17

Is this how the eastern labs "distill" SOTA models? If you can play it right, you don't even need to send suspicious prompts to the frontier models. Just use them for regular tasks, extract the encrypted COT blocks and replay it to a cheaper model to get the plain text COT. But the real question is: Is it okay to steal from a thief's hoard?

>But the real question is: Is it okay to steal from a thief's hoard?

How does this relate to your previous paragraphs? LLM outputs are not copyrightable and you didn't break into Anthropic servers to steal the files from there. So how exactly is it theft? If I send an "encrypted" files to thousands of peoples and some manage to figure out how to read it I can't really accuse them of that or can I?

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#150

Post by qwytw » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #19

myworkaccount2 wrote: post #17

Is this how the eastern labs "distill" SOTA models? If you can play it right, you don't even need to send suspicious prompts to the frontier models. Just use them for regular tasks, extract the encrypted COT blocks and replay it to a cheaper model to get the plain text COT. But the real question is: Is it okay to steal from a thief's hoard?

The reasoning blocks are not stolen/mined from the internet at large directly. They’re the result of a lot of research, time, money, and expertise into creating a reasoning model. To me the answer is quite clearly no, especially when the encrypted blocks demonstrate they want to protect it.

That's a moral stance one can take (regardless of the severe cognitive dissonance embedded in it). But what does that have to do with theft? LLM providers don't own the copyrights to the outputs of their models (at least not yet).