Disrupting a coordinated model-distillation campaign

OpenAI recently disrupted a coordinated model-distillation campaign that began in early July. This adversarial activity involved systematically using OpenAI's model outputs to train or improve other models, specifically extracting "protected reasoning"—the internal record of how a model works through a task. Initial low-volume activity on July 1 escalated to high-volume spikes on July 24 and 25, with 16,000 requests from over 4,000 users. Related prompt-pattern activity across more than 15,000 users was fully disrupted by July 28.

This report is the first public disclosure by OpenAI of a coordinated adversarial distillation campaign, detailing the scale and their response to the activity.