Researchers can now read the hidden reasoning inside frontier AI APIs
A new paper says every major AI lab's encrypted "chain of thought" can be decoded from ordinary API responses, exposing private data users pasted into chats. Since OpenAI's o1, frontier labs have hidden their models' step-by-step reasoning behind cryptographic signatures, fearing rivals would distill it. The protection was supposed to be a hard confidentiality barrier. It was not. A team led by Alexander Panfilov and Jonas Geiping showed that a legitimate signed reasoning block pulled from one
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