---
title: "Distillation complicates OpenAI’s chain-of-thought story"
date: 2026-09-07
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2096789301724094947/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2096789301724094947
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

"we deliberately designed the product to hide the chain of thought⁠, to protect it from supervision pressure in the long term^2"

*Moves over to the footnote*

"A secondary reason for this design was preventing distillation. However, maintaining CoT monitorability has explicitly been the bigger priority for us throughout development."

I was about to tweet about dishonesty in this post. Then I decided to Ctrl+F and search for distillation

Might be the first time this was said publicly through an official channel. I am not so sure about maintaining competitive edge being lower priority than safety. Distillation is an existential threat to frontier labs

I wish @merettm posted more. It really increases trust in OpenAI, compared to some other people

Now, to pay off the honesty debt fully, they should clear up whether they knew about https://collusion.wiki/ already, or any other rogue action for that matter

*Quotes a post by @merettm (https://x.com/merettm/status/2096630018495377464); its text is omitted here because it is not covered by this site's license.*