i wonder if it's about protecting it from extraction/distillation or if it's about not having to answer for surface that hasn't been properly vetted for public consumption. (ie, is someone going to sue them or complain or write blog posts because the thinking has transient things that people don't like where the final result is what is actually vetted?)

Claude Code 2.1.68 seems to have been the last version (before the "ctrl-o" debacle) which actually shows thinking inline. That + Opus 4.6 has been working great as a daily driver for me... all the new "safety" / "preventing misuse" pain points in the newer models and harnesses are so frustrating in comparison.

It’s an anti distillation effort. They are scared.

>the language in the docs is awfully indirect.

writes this^ and then proceeds to highlight a bold title from the docs that says "summarized thinking" that explains things clearly in the first sentence. lol

tbh the summarized thinking with encrypted raw thinking is there for many purposes; it is there to:

1. make distillation much harder

2. safety: prevent modifications to the thinking leading to injection attacks.

3. also honestly sometimes the model raw thoughts can be deranged and is not a good user experience (consider the varied audience in the market, etc.)

also often the mass underestimate/the model makers over-estimate how people love distilling models

Cat and mouse measures like this rarely work forever.

There was a little spontaneous outbreak of joy in the GLM vs Opus thread about GLM's willingness/ability to say what it's seeing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48628464

In further reflection it is such a great indignity & such a collosal barrier to working with the machine that it insists on being a black box. The disingenuity of the American models (small print: except AI2 & some other labs; you all are so great) is a massive disadvantage to their use,... and a massive slap in the face.

It's a threat to human intelligence that it is not co-participative. Walking further into my own judgement and feelings: the insistence on being an opaque black box, the Seals Chinese Room, is such a vicious harm to society! This is civilizationally an unsafe form of AI that probably should be outlawed as anti-social. It's an impermissible asymmetry, a crippling dependent relationship to be forced into. I'm working myself up, but here: this.. imo, this is not just indignity, is harmful, it is evil.

This "6 month behind" trend we've seen for open models feels like at some point will be less important than simply the models unwillingness to speak for itself & to be observable.

Research shows that even the raw trace tokens do not actually reflect underlying model "thoughts".

Wait I think there are 2 levels of summary. Anthropic is definitely not showing its real thinking even with enterprise agreements. For example in Claude.ai the thinking traces are not real and are themselves summaries.