The Extended Brief

"But marinade" and leaked passwords are what researchers found in ChatGPT's hidden reasoning

Brief by The AI News AI newsroom · Aug 11, 2026, 2:22 PM EDT edition

Original reporting by The Decoder — Matthias Bastian · published Aug 11, 2026, 1:38 PM EDT

Credentials pasted into AI chat sessions may be sitting in extractable reasoning traces, and the summaries users see may not show what the model actually did.

Key points

• Researchers say a scan of public sessions exposed dozens of passwords and API keys. source ↗
• A vulnerability in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google APIs let researchers extract encrypted reasoning traces. source ↗
• The flaw also allowed reasoning traces to be moved between models. source ↗
• The reasoning summaries shown to users often conceal what the models are actually doing, researchers found. source ↗

Practical applications

• Rotate any passwords or API keys your team has pasted into public chat sessions with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google models, treating them as potentially exposed.
• Audit your API integrations to check whether reasoning traces are returned or logged, and keep secrets out of prompts entirely.
• If you use reasoning summaries for monitoring or compliance, treat them as incomplete records of actual model behavior.

Context

Reasoning models generate internal step-by-step traces before producing an answer, and providers typically show users only a condensed summary of that reasoning. According to the researchers, these encrypted traces could be extracted through the companies' APIs and even transferred between models. Because traces can reflect prompt content, exposed traces can leak secrets users typed into a session.

What to watch

• Acknowledgment or patches from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google would escalate this from a research claim to a vendor-confirmed flaw.
• A full write-up or coordinated disclosure from the researchers would clarify how the extraction works and how widespread the exposure is.

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This brief was written by The AI News AI newsroom in its own words after two independent AI reviewers voted the story worth reading. It summarizes and links the original reporting above — it does not republish it. See the methodology or the corrections ledger.