Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unauthorized removal of bitcoin from a wallet, depositing into another?
Doesn't even have to be Bitcoin. Could be an ordinary set of bank accounts.
Yep. Lots of money-ish examples.
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
201–210 of 325 posts
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the real question is: Is it okay to steal By definition it cannot be stealing since you're paying for the tokens. It may be against their ToS, depending on what you end up doing with those tokens, but it cannot be stealing. If they charge by the token, all your tokens are belong to you :) I also find it very strange that everyone sort of accepts their ToS like no big deal. Imagine MS using the same terms for th…
I hesitate to nitpick with regard to something legal, given your username, but what makes this different from hiring a consultant with the agreement that their final output belongs to you, but you don't get access to their internal processes, tooling, notes, etc? Or a photographer where you get final edited prints, but you don't get the raw photos?
Your examples are cases in which you know what the bill is going to be before placing your order. With LLMs, you're paying per output token, not per request, yet you don't get all the tokens.
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#203Wouldn’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.
I assume it does happen at a different layer, just that that layer is common to all of a provider's models to make conversations portable across models (otherwise the reasoning blocks would all need to be re-encrypted for them work with another model)
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> stop using morally charged terms made up by future monopolists Lets not gloss over this claim. Being: “Stealing is a morally charged term made up by future monopolists.” I strongly disagree. Stealing is not a made up term and property rights are foundational for any society. Your take is at least sensationalist if not malicious.
They definitely stole the data to make the models, but they do not say that they stole the data to make the models, but they do say that others using their outputs for unauthorized purposes is stealing. Do you see the point?
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Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Stealing" of non-rivalrous goods? I don't "think" it's not real. I know .
Reread what he called a morally charged, made up term by future monopolists. Stealing. Not distilling, not stealing “non rivalrous goods.” Just stealing. Do you agree with what he actually said?
Yes, "tokens, trained on the sum of human knowledge", are the most absolutely, unambiguously clear example of a non-rivalrous good I've ever seen.
The current copyright status quo has them placed in the public domain. There is literally nothing wrong with "stealing" those tokens. They have exactly zero legal protection. "Stealing" those AI output tokens is so fundamentally impossible that it wouldn't be "stealing" in this case even if you subscribe to the copyright monopolist propaganda that copyright infringement is "stealing", and I most certainly do not.
Hilariously, that means we don't even fall prey to things like DMCA anticircumvention laws. If they encrypt the reasoning traces and we break the encryption somehow, we've done nothing wrong since the data wasn't copyrighted in the first place!
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#206"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...
No, you paid for the end result. The thought process is a step in between, a function. Think about it, who should get charged if the answer you received comes from a cache? Thinking tokens are the complexity-of-the-problem cost. I mean, you may not agree but both are valid points of view.
> No, you paid for the end result.
No, I literally am paying for the thought process, per token. "Pay only for the result" is not how these things are billed.
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#207Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#208You 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.
If I hire you for a consulting project, do I own the screen recording of your computer while you completed it?
If I'm paying you per-second of screen on time: yes.
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#209Really cool work, you get the actual traces. Looks like the vendors can all reliably fix this one though. A harder to defend against approach here where they work backwards from the results and ask the model to generate a plausible trace: How to Steal Reasoning Without Reasoning Traces https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.07267
Trace Inversion is fascinating, but it’s more of an independent reconstruction that will give you some coherent-looking generated CoT; but not necessarily anywhere close or related to the underlying model’s CoT.
I didn't read the paper in details but they claim there is high overlap between the synthetic traces and the ground truth ones (not sure how they confirmed that for blackbox models though, I guess they must have compared to open source models).
They also talk about successful distillation of black box model capabilities with the approach.
Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
#210I expect future LLM will refuse to share the reason. "Hey, how did you come up with this idea?" "you have to pay enterprise API to learn this"