A New Trick Reveals AI Models’ Inner Thoughts
Will KnightBusinessAug 11, 2026 7:00 AMA New Trick Reveals AI Models’ Inner ThoughtsResearchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. In February, OpenAI told US lawmakers that DeekSeek seemed to have copied one of its models to build a reasoning model called R1. In June, Anthropic told lawmakers that Alibaba had systematically distilled its models in order to build its own, called Qwen.There’s no indication that Chinese AI companies used this specific technique to distill US-based AI models.
- ▪Will KnightBusinessAug 11, 2026 7:00 AMA New Trick Reveals AI Models’ Inner ThoughtsResearchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini.
- ▪In February, OpenAI told US lawmakers that DeekSeek seemed to have copied one of its models to build a reasoning model called R1.
- ▪In June, Anthropic told lawmakers that Alibaba had systematically distilled its models in order to build its own, called Qwen.There’s no indication that Chinese AI companies used this specific technique to distill US-based AI models.
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Will KnightBusinessAug 11, 2026 7:00 AMA New Trick Reveals AI Models’ Inner ThoughtsResearchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyComputer scientists recently discovered a way to extract the hidden “thinking” that frontier AI models perform as they work through complex problems.The findings provide some evidence—although not conclusive proof—that certain Chinese models may have been trained by “distilling” reasoning information from US models that was supposedly hidden because of how closely some of their thinking or reasoning patterns…
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