The reasoning blocks are not stolen/mined from the internet at large directly. They’re the result of a lot of research, time, money, and expertise into creating a reasoning model. To me the answer is quite clearly no, especially when the encrypted blocks demonstrate they want to protect it.
That's a moral stance one can take (regardless of the severe cognitive dissonance embedded in it). But what does that have to do with theft? LLM providers don't own the copyrights to the outputs of their models (at least not yet).
No. There are dozens of companies that resell tokens at a discount to collect and resell session data to various Chinese labs.
if you make reasoning soup of my data withou my consent it still is my data and i did not ask for your reasoning soup
Most post-training tasks are based on real open source projects. A lot of time on real issues posted on issue trackers.
Besides that, the capabilities of a model are heavily dependent on the unsupervised learning phase, that gobbles all kind of other people's IP without giving a fuck. All the underpaid work behind the masses of third world programmers creating those post-training datasets would be completely uselless without it.
Also, it is kind of funny that labs resort to the "Research, time, money and expertise" argumet, when it is basically the same argument from publishers and other IP creator that the labs spent millions of dollars of lawyering money to resist. Besides, US law rejects in: Effort and cost by themselves not necessarely generate protectable interests.
About encryption, I think we're all contaminated by the bad ideology behind DMCA. While encryption established the intent, it doesn't follow that they have a legal claim of exclusivity just because of it.
Technically, you're overstating the value of so called "reasoning traces". You can't infer the verifier design, the reward shaping,or the data pipeline from them. Also, what you can extract are not the traces themselves, but the written summary of it, and you can't even guarantee that this summary reflects the exactly reasoning trace, models have show to have lied about it. Besides, distillation works when the student model already has strong priors, you can't turn a weak model in a SOTA with it. Don't believe Amodei's outrageous lies about it, he is just trying to exercise some regulatory capture.
Stuff available on the internet is also the result of a lot of research, time, money, and expertise. And AI companies taught us that it’s OK to yoink whatever is not bolted to the ground, even when it is illegal to do so.