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Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

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Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#231

Post by articulatepang »

nonethewiser wrote: post #180
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...

> 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.

I’m pretty sure the person you’re replying to means stealing in the context of information, IP, copyright, etc.

This thread and this entire topic isn’t about stealing physical goods or money. We can all agree that if I break into your house and take your TV then that’s the ancient, obvious crime of stealing.

Grice’s maxims and common sense indicate that we’re talking about the word “stealing” as applied to infringement or unauthorized copying.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#232

Post by articulatepang »

hamandcheese wrote: post #208
levocardia wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it depends on whatever contract you signed. If you signed a contract that says “you pay per minute of screen time but only get the end result” then I bet that if you went to court demanding the screen recording, you’d lose.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#233

Post by drdaeman »

nonethewiser wrote: post #191
drdaeman wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and we collectively had this decades ago already. “Stealing” instead of “infringement” is originally MAFIAA language intentionally (ab)used to encourage emotional reaction despite original owner not losing their copy. If you broke into a data center, pulled a hard drive and drive off with it - that’s stealing. If you accessed a copy of some information - that’s infringement, unauthorized access, or some other vio…

One problem. He said stealing in general is a made up term. Do you think stealing is real?

Read it in the context. The “made up” wasn’t a general statement. No one argues stealing doesn’t exist at all. My friend’s bike was stolen. What’s made up is application of this word to situations that are incompatible with what stealing is supposed to mean.

Compare this to “the smell of soup and the sound of money” type “theft”.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#234

Post by articulatepang »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #25
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 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…

> If they charge by the token, all your tokens are belong to you

I’m not sure this argument is correct. You can sign whatever contract you like with the model provider, right? Including “you are entitled to the end product but not the intermediate scratch work”?

Coming from a place of genuine curiosity: is there some precedent or statute that would invalidate that contract? I don’t see why the reasoning tokens belong to you.

For example, I pay lawyers by the hour but don’t necessarily own their meeting minutes, recorded discussions, research notes, etc.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#235

Post by nathanwh »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #224
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...

Suppose you hired a consulting firm to write a report, and they delivered the report but not the internal conversations they had when developing it. You exploit a vulnerability in their phone system to get those conversations. You can argue over semantics of whether “theft” is what you did, maybe the right word is “espionage” or “spying”, but that either way we probably agree you are guilty of something? Paying for t…

I think a more fair comparison would be that you hired a consulting firm to create a report and give you a summary of it, but you’re charged for the report itself separately from the summary, and you are not allowed to access the unsummarized report.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#236

Post by articulatepang »

wyan wrote: post #202
senordevnyc wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you hire lawyers or consultants you usually don’t know how many hours they’ll bill you. It will depend on developments in the case that you cannot in general predict. For example if the other side files a motion and your lawyer has to argue against it, they’ll bill you for it.

Sure you can set spending limits, just like you can make an account and give it a limited amount of credits.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#237

Post by selestify »

nathanwh wrote: post #235
ashdksnndck wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you hired a consulting firm to write a report, and they delivered the report but not the internal conversations they had when developing it. You exploit a vulnerability in their phone system to get those conversations. You can argue over semantics of whether “theft” is what you did, maybe the right word is “espionage” or “spying”, but that either way we probably agree you are guilty of something? Paying for t…

I think a more fair comparison would be that you hired a consulting firm to create a report and give you a summary of it, but you’re charged for the report itself separately from the summary, and you are not allowed to access the unsummarized report.

How is that a more fair comparison? The consulting firm in this case never promised you the interim reports, only the summaries of the reports. They also promised you the final output that the reports led to. You decided that report summaries + final output was worth paying for. You got exactly what you were promised.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#238

Post by wonnage »

varenc wrote: post #228
desterothx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how some of the biggest advancements in llms came from the Chinese labs, yet people still jump to distillation being unreasonably effective. Distillation is very good at creating smaller models from large ones sure, but nothing to me indicates it is 'unreasonably effective' compared to all the other bells and whistles being iterated on

This article shows that when Kimi3's chain of thought is prefilled to match Opus's, the rest of the chain of thoughts Kimi3 outputs very closely aligns with Opus's. That seems strong evidence that Kimi3 is partly a distillation of Opus. And Kimi3 is not a small model. No doubt a lot of hard work went into Kimi, but seems clear that distillation was used effectively as well. (though maybe there's another interpretatio…

Didn’t Kimi3 release a week before opus 5?

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#239

Post by amazingman »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #224
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...

Suppose you hired a consulting firm to write a report, and they delivered the report but not the internal conversations they had when developing it. You exploit a vulnerability in their phone system to get those conversations. You can argue over semantics of whether “theft” is what you did, maybe the right word is “espionage” or “spying”, but that either way we probably agree you are guilty of something? Paying for t…

Except in this case the report is giving you conclusions while withholding the data and reasoning process that lead to those conclusions.

Alternatively, I paid for the tokens therefore I should have access to them. If the vendor wants to artificially hide them from me, I'll just find another way to access them.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#240

Post by amazingman »

dymk wrote: post #216
paxys wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only person calling it stealing is the author of this article, so this is a pointless discussion. The majority of this thread is just arguing with themselves.

Anthropic and OpenAI made a big deal about how it's stealing.

They also have made a big deal about how what they did to build their models is not stealing. And we all know that's bullshit.
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