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Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

stolen-thoughts.com

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Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#241

Post by iot_devs »

selestify wrote: post #237
nathanwh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally read the thinking traces to know if the model is on the right direction

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#242

Post by NitpickLawyer »

articulatepang wrote: post #234
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

> 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…

Sure, but the current one is charged per token in & token out. Not per completion / task / hour / whatever. You can't charge per token and then say "you stole that token". Again, they can unilaterally decide not to sell you tokens anymore, at any time, for any (legal) reason. But as it stands right now, it can't be stealing.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#243

Post by fragmede »

brianxq3 wrote: post #223
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.

They are also encrypting it so they must see some reason to do this. I suspect they think it is proprietary or otherwise a way that people can “steal” their implementations.

The reason for this is the LLM says some truly unhinged shit while in the thinking stage of the process, and Twitter would trip over itself to make fun of what it says.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#244

Post by jijji »

The fact that frontier LLM providers pirated all the data that they used for training, then to go on to encrypt all of the reasoning traces that they use to come up with the conclusions it's really disingenuous, and then have the balls to say distillation is some kind of bad behavior. they are the kings of distillation.

The hiding of this data only brings distrust to their frontier models. I think most people want to understand how something comes to a conclusion they don't want have that part left out on purpose...

it's this kind of behavior that forces people move to to open source models in the end, it's the lack of trust. the frontier model providers treat the end user/customer as a threat or adversary. Fable 5 is notorious for this. a lot of the serious questions you ask the model they won't even respond to you because of the woke guardrails. it wasn't only a couple weeks ago that huggingface had to use glm 5.2 to get the right answers about their security incident because Fable 5 didn't want to answer it.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#245

Post by flawn »

tristanj wrote: post #32
azinman2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. There are dozens of companies that resell tokens at a discount to collect and resell session data to various Chinese labs.

So you say, they at least create economic value through obscurity of something which should be accessible?

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#246

Post by blackqueeriroh »

amazingman wrote: post #240
dymk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, we actually don’t all know that.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#247

Post by fragmede »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #215
nonethewiser wrote: post #180

Earlier 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.

How much did anthropic pay to book publishers, and everybody else whose content they stole, for stealing their content ???

$1.3 billion, iirc.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#248

Post by selestify »

iot_devs wrote: post #241
selestify wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally read the thinking traces to know if the model is on the right direction

I'm not saying they're not useful, of course they are. I am disputing that they are part of the agreed bargain between you and the proprietary LLM providers.

They explicitly do not promise reasoning traces. You (general you) agree to those terms and pay for that bargain anyways.

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#249

Post by klntsky »

Pragmata wrote: post #119

Apparently you can do the same by simply running it without reasoning, while giving it a thinking tool... >guys you do know you can just disable thinking, and instead give it a "deep_think" tool, and it will call it with internal CoT reasoning format right? >gl fixing that https://x.com/_can1357/status/2087228354399265125?s=20

The model is finetuned to enter/leave its thinking mode using special token separators. there's no reason to assume the tool calls induce the same token distribution or produce the model's actual native reasoning trace

Re: Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

#250

Post by encomiast »

paxys wrote: post #153
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...

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.

Stealing may be the wrong word, but I actually think this is important. I don't think the providers have been up-front about how we should be handling these thought signatures. A large system with a lot of users may be capturing these and even caching them to send them back with future requests. If data can be pulled out of these, then they need to be treated more like cookies than opaque, encrypted nonces.
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