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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Is this what they mean by "encryption" - as in "no human-readable text"? Or are they actually encrypting the compaction outputs before sending them back to the client? If so, why?

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"encrypted_content" is just a poorly worded variable name that indicates the content of that "item" should be treated as an opaque foreign key. No actual encryption (in the cryptographic sense) is involved.

Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks!

Are you sure? For reasoning, encrypted_content is for sure actually encrypted.

Hmmm, no, I don't know this for sure. In my testing, the /compact endpoint seems to work almost too well for large/complex conversations, and it feels like it cannot contain the entire latent space, so I assumed it keeps pointers inside it (ala previous_response_id). On the other hand, OpenAI says it's stateless and compatible with Zero Data Retention, so maybe it can contain everything.

They say they do not compress the user messages, but yeah, it's purpose is to do very lossy compression of everything else. I'd expect it to be small.

This is not correct, encrypted content is in fact encrypted content. For openai to be able to support ZDR there needs to be a way for you to store reasoning content client side without being able to see the actual tokens. The tokens need to stay secret because it often contains reasoning related to safety and instruction following. So openai gives it to you encrypted and keeps the keys for decrypting on their side so it can be re-rendered into tokens when given to the model.

There is also another reason, to prevent some attacks related to injecting things in reasoning blocks. Anthropic has published some studies on this. By using encrypted content, openai and rely on it not being modified. Openai and anthropic have started to validate that you're not removing these messages between requests in certain modes like extended thinking for safety and performance reasons

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