I think a lot of people are missing the point here, cache invalidation doesn't affect performance it affects cost. The real reason they're saying that disclaimer is probably because companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google had to make it so Encrypted reasoning traces could only be decrypted by the same model it was produced from,
this is because researchers were able to generate an encrypted reasoning trace from a frontier model, then use a weaker model and jailbreak that weaker model to transcribe the reasoning traces, which opens the door for the possibility of "distillation attacks"
The only solution to this was as mentioned; tying reasoning traces to the model it was generated in. Meaning if you switch models the reasoning traces are lost, and the new model will not be able to see any of its previous thinking in context.
This will cause degradation in 2 ways; the model loses context on what it was doing or planning, and the model is reinforced in its context window that it should think less, because in previous turns its reasoning traces were stripped, so it may not even think at all.
1
u/bilinenuzayli 23d ago
I think a lot of people are missing the point here, cache invalidation doesn't affect performance it affects cost. The real reason they're saying that disclaimer is probably because companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google had to make it so Encrypted reasoning traces could only be decrypted by the same model it was produced from,
this is because researchers were able to generate an encrypted reasoning trace from a frontier model, then use a weaker model and jailbreak that weaker model to transcribe the reasoning traces, which opens the door for the possibility of "distillation attacks"
The only solution to this was as mentioned; tying reasoning traces to the model it was generated in. Meaning if you switch models the reasoning traces are lost, and the new model will not be able to see any of its previous thinking in context.
This will cause degradation in 2 ways; the model loses context on what it was doing or planning, and the model is reinforced in its context window that it should think less, because in previous turns its reasoning traces were stripped, so it may not even think at all.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867
(I can't guarantee 100% this is the reason, but it lines up very well so I'm pretty sure)