Protecting Language Models Against Unauthorized Distillation through Trace Rewriting

arXiv:2602.15143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge distillation is a widely adopted technique for transferring capabilities from LLMs to smaller, more efficient student models. However, unauthorized use of knowledge distillation takes unfair advantage of the considerable effort and cost put into developing frontier models. We investigate methods for modifying teacher-generated reasoning traces to achieve two objectives that deter unauthorized distillation: (1) \emph{anti-distillation}