To be fair, I assume they want to hide that not from their customers, but adversaries who use the way Claude models think and reason to refine their own models.
It's also hard to have sympathy for them - they want to protect their IP, sure. But their IP was built on a corpus of dubious legal provenance. And even if the courts decide their training data are legal, most of the authors of the data would disagree. There was no consent given.
I think LLM's are great - don't get me wrong. I'm glad they were built the way they were, because it's unlocking an amazing new world. But I just don't have sympathy for the "I stole this and now it's mine so you can't steal it" argument behind concealing reasoning traces.
In any case, highly misunderstood.
[0] not technically distillation. https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-06-15-rl-economic...