OpenAI Says People Linked to China’s Moonshot Tried to Copy Its AI’s Hidden Reasoning

OpenAI claims to have shut down a coordinated effort to copy the way its AI models think, and it traces a core cluster of that activity to people associated with Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind the Kimi chatbot. The campaign began on July 1, according to OpenAI. On July 24 and 25 alone, it logged 16,000 extraction requests from more than 4,000 users, part of a wider cluster of over 15,000 users. OpenAI says it fully disrupted the activity by July 28. The target wasn’t the answers, but the work behind them. Modern AI models “reason” before they reply—they…