We recently identified and disrupted a coordinated campaign designed to extract protected reasoning from our models, with the earliest observed activity occurring in the first week of July.

This activity is consistent with adversarial distillation: the systematic and unauthorized use of one model’s outputs or reasoning to help train, reproduce, or improve another model.

Protected reasoning is the model’s internal record for working through a task; extracting it can reveal information withheld from the final answer and help others reproduce the model’s capabilities.

The operators did not break our encryption, compromise a database, or gain direct access to stored user conversations.

Instead, they manipulated model interactions so that protected reasoning could be reproduced in forms visible to the requester in a coordinated, scaled manner that violated our terms of service.

This manipulation is not a vulnerability unique to OpenAI’s models, and we have shared information about it with industry partners through the Frontier Model Forum in order to strengthen collective defenses against adversarial distillation.

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