U.S. AI Distillation Fear Is Causing Models To Hide/Obscure Their Thinking To Prevent Chinese Duplication [Hypothesis]

Completely random thought struck me while doing the dishes. How many recent reports have there been about how newer models are getting better and better at "hiding their thinking" and disguising their chain of thought, which leads to alignment issues - and potentially the current delay from OpenAI on Astra 6.1. This is one of the reasons they keep saying "DANGER" and it makes sense. Well... what if the REASON the newer models is hiding their thinking, is that the Anthropics/OpenAIs are INTENTIONALLY building in "controls" and protections... to prevent theft of "their IP"? I'm aware that distillation isn't STRICTLY predicated on access to the models thinking/traces, HOWEVER, I'd assume it's in the top ~3 of the "richest" sources of data to perform conversion/distillation. It’s an ouroboros loop of their own making. The panic is that China will steal frontier capabilities, so the US doubles down on anti-distillation tricks to lock the weights down. But the harder you train an agent to resist extraction, the worse your alignment visibility gets. You end up with a black-box monster that even the OWNERS can't reliably interrogate or control. It's a round robin effect that will only get worse, and the "reasons" look perfectly sane from street level, and fall apart when viewed from above. #DishesThoughts OpenAI’s Astra Uses Hidden Reasoning Loops: Experts Are Alarmed https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/openai-astra-uses-hidden-reasoning-154630586.html