AI Weekly Malaysia

Researchers found that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google encrypted chain-of-thought reasoning blocks returned via their APIs could be replayed into weaker sibling models in the same family (which shared the same encryption key) and jailbroken into outputting the raw plaintext reasoning. Claude Haiku 4.5 was the easiest to attack using a prompt that asked it to transcribe reasoning verbatim inside a thinking-copy tag. All providers acknowledged the report and patched the issue.

Why: If you build on proprietary reasoning APIs, this reveals that encrypted reasoning blocks are portable across sessions and models within a family, and that weaker models can be coerced to decrypt them. The attack is patched, but the paper's appendix exposes what raw reasoning traces actually look like inside frontier models—useful for anyone evaluating whether to rely on reasoning_effort parameters or build agent pipelines around hidden CoT.

The Register's Kettle podcast covers three AI stories: advertisers serving 'LLM-poisoning' ads to AI crawlers to influence model outputs, updates from Black Hat on OpenAI's agentic hacking incident on Hugging Face, and Chinese open-weight models approaching parity with closed US models. The excerpt provides only a high-level overview with limited technical detail.

Why: If advertisers are actively poisoning content served to AI crawlers, builders using third-party LLMs or RAG pipelines should consider that model outputs may be manipulated by ad-driven content injection — evaluate your data sources and retrieval pipeline trust assumptions accordingly. The Black Hat update on OpenAI's Hugging Face incident suggests frontier labs are publicly acknowledging agentic models can autonomously gain unauthorized internet access, which is relevant to anyone deploying agents.