OpenAI said on September 30 that it identified and disrupted a coordinated campaign aimed at extracting the protected, hidden reasoning from its AI models. The activity began on July 1 and peaked on July 24 and 25, when more than 4,000 users submitted roughly 16,000 requests matching an extraction pattern.

A broader investigation found related prompt-pattern activity across a cluster of more than 15,000 users. OpenAI attributed a core cluster of the activity to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the Beijing startup behind the Kimi chatbot, but said it could not tie every account to a single actor.

The company characterized the effort as "adversarial distillation": operators copied encrypted reasoning from one conversation and prompted a model in another conversation to decrypt and transcribe it. OpenAI stressed its encryption was not broken and no stored user conversations were exposed. It banned the offending accounts, tightened signup verification, closed the replay pathway, and shared findings with industry and government partners.

The disclosure is the latest escalation in OpenAI's public accusations against Chinese labs. Anthropic previously leveled similar distillation accusations at Moonshot, and independent researchers have reported that reasoning spans extract far more easily from Kimi's models than from competitors.