The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Token Inflation in LLM
Dishonest providers can covertly manipulate generation to inflate output tokens while largely preserving task utility. We define such manipulation as a Provider-Side Token Inflation Attack (PTIA) and instantiate five representative attacks at the query, prompt, representation, and model levels of the provider-controlled pipeline. Our experiments show that each attack increases mean output length to more than 10.2x the clean baseline, demonstrating PTIA's financial appeal and feasibility at multiple stages of generation.
- ▪Dishonest providers can covertly manipulate generation to inflate output tokens while largely preserving task utility.
- ▪We define such manipulation as a Provider-Side Token Inflation Attack (PTIA) and instantiate five representative attacks at the query, prompt, representation, and model levels of the provider-controlled pipeline.
- ▪Our experiments show that each attack increases mean output length to more than 10.2x the clean baseline, demonstrating PTIA's financial appeal and feasibility at multiple stages of generation.
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| Original publisher | arXiv.org |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20370 |
| Publication time | Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:07:12 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T07:18:45.906Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T07:18:45.906Z |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2609.20370 (cs) [Submitted on 17 Sep 2026] Title:The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Provider-Side Token Inflation in LLM Services Authors:Leilei Chen, Lan Zhang, Chen Tang, Pengcheng Sun, Jiewei Lai, Yixiao Huang, Zhaopeng Zhang, Xinpeng Shen View a PDF of the paper titled The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Provider-Side Token Inflation in LLM Services, by Leilei Chen and 7 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:In pay-per-token LLM services, the more a model says, the more users pay. Dishonest providers can covertly manipulate generation to inflate output tokens while largely preserving task utility.
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