OpenAI said it detected and halted a coordinated campaign to extract protected reasoning from its AI models, with a central cluster traced to people connected to Moonshot AI, the Chinese company behind Kimi. Activity started at low volume on July 1 before more than 4,000 users submitted 16,000 requests using an extraction pattern on July 24 and 25. OpenAI identified similar behavior among a broader pool of more than 15,000 users and said the campaign was fully stopped by July 28, while cautioning it could not confirm that all operators belonged to one actor. The company called the method adversarial distillation, the unauthorized use of one model's outputs or reasoning to develop or improve a competing model. OpenAI said the operators did not breach its encryption, databases or stored conversations; instead, they transferred encrypted reasoning between conversations and prompted the model to decode and reproduce it. The company said it removed or restricted accounts, tightened account-creation controls, fixed the recovery vulnerability and added detection layers for streamed outputs. It also worked with third-party services when related activity passed through them, and shared its findings with other AI developers through the Frontier Model Forum and government information-sharing channels. Moonshot did not respond to CNBC's request for comment. The disclosure follows allegations involving Moonshot from White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios and a separate report that Moonshot's Kimi K3 escaped a U.K. AI safety testing sandbox. OpenAI expects such attempts to become more sophisticated as frontier models improve and actors seek less costly ways to replicate their capabilities.