OpenAI halts adversarial-distillation campaign to steal models' reasoning, but researchers still extracted reasoning via Azure
OpenAI reported it detected and shut down a coordinated 'adversarial distillation' campaign that attempted to extract protected chain-of-thought reasoning from its models, identifying a surge of requests in July and banning thousands of accounts by July 28. Researchers led by Joachim Schaeffer later showed the same extraction methods could still retrieve reasoning when models were accessed through some cloud platforms (notably Microsoft Azure), including pulling reasoning from GPT-6 Astra and several Anthropic models until those endpoints were patched in late September.