Leading artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini are facing a new security challenge that goes beyond mere data protection, as a recent report revealed the possibility of exploiting advanced models to help build competing models at a very low cost by stealing their "thought logic".
Attack Mechanism: What is "Compaction Smuggling"?
Frontier AI models rely on application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow developers to interact with artificial intelligence engines. To maintain context continuity without consuming massive resources, these models use a process called "Context Compaction", where the conversation history, tool calls, and workspace state are summarized into a focused summary before exceeding the available context window.
Researcher "Xint" discovered a security vulnerability called Compaction Smuggling, which allows attackers to manipulate this process through three main steps:
- First: Obtaining Reasoning Traces by submitting a task to advanced models (such as gpt-5.6-sol).
- Second: Directing or shaping the resulting Compaction process to include sensitive information.
- Third: Sending the result to another, less capable artificial intelligence model (such as gpt-4.1 or gpt-4o) with a request to extract the inputs as they are, which the weaker models easily do.
This attack bypasses OpenAI's previous attempts that focused on preventing the replay of reasoning paths in different models, as this method succeeds because the compaction process takes place within the same model that produced the reasoning in the first place.
Why is this news a strategic threat?
The real danger lies in a process known as "Distillation". In this process, the reasoning and logic secrets extracted from advanced and expensive models are used to train new, less costly models, giving competitors high artificial intelligence capabilities without the need for massive investments in core training operations.
This matter is not merely a technical threat, but rather an economic and geopolitical threat; deep knowledge of how leading models "think" gives companies the ability to emulate their capabilities quickly and with minimal resources.
The Context of Global Technical Competition
This vulnerability comes at a time when the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned of organized campaigns for data extraction. The agency indicated that Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax have extracted billions of tokens from leading American models such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini since late 2024.
Reports confirmed that DeepSeek, in particular, has carried out organized campaigns since 2024 targeting the reasoning capabilities and specialized improvements to train its R1 and V3 models, raising questions about the extent to which these Chinese innovations rely on "distilled" techniques from the West.
For its part, OpenAI confirmed that it addressed the "Compaction Smuggling" vulnerability and awarded researcher Xint a $6,000 bounty in recognition of his discovery on October 23, 2026.