OpenAI says actors linked to China-based Moonshot AI spearheaded a campaign to extract its models’ hidden reasoning

OpenAI said in a company blog post that people associated with China-based Moonshot AI were at the core of an effort to pull hidden reasoning from its models. The post says that a “coordinated campaign” to extract “protected reasoning” from its models, which was “consistent with adversarial distillation,” occurred in July. OpenAI isn’t sure whether all of the operators it saw were a single actor.

Activity began on July 1st, “initially at a low volume.” After that came “high-volume spikes” on July 24 and 25, with 16,000 requests using an extraction pattern. The requests came from over 4,000 users. The activity attempted extraction but was “not necessarily successful,” and the campaign was “fully disrupted by July 28.” The post did not clarify any measure of success rate, which models were specifically targeted, or how many of the users were Moonshot-linked.

OpenAI defines protected reasoning as “the model’s internal record for working through a task” and adversarial distillation as the “systematic …