On September 30, OpenAI published an account of a coordinated campaign to obtain protected reasoning from its AI models. The company describes model distillation as using one system's outputs to train or improve another. In this case, it says, the requests sought material beyond the answers normally shown to users: intermediate reasoning that could help reproduce a model's capabilities.
According to OpenAI, the activity began in July. It involved manipulating model interactions, including attempts to carry encrypted reasoning between conversations and have it rendered as visible text. The company says the campaign did not break encryption or directly access stored conversations. Its response included account restrictions, monitoring and changes intended to close the reasoning replay route. The account describes both the attempted extraction and the company's countermeasures; it does not establish that every request succeeded.
COPY CAT takes the idea of imitation and builds a fictional trap around it. You control a blue cat in eight small rooms. A red cat repeats your previous command; later, a gold cat follows two commands behind. Their memories begin empty, so the red cat stands still on your first move. They copy instructions, rather than tracing your exact path. A wall that stops you may leave a clear route beneath another pair of paws.
The goal is to send every copy into a shaft, then reach the green exit yourself. Arrows take one step. A with a direction jumps two cells, while B opens nearby doors or spends a command waiting. Copies can open doors too. Each room allows eighty commands, and unused commands add to your score when you clear it. There is no countdown while you think. Select undoes a command, including a fatal one, so a bad prediction can become the next experiment.
The cats, shafts and delayed moves are puzzle rules invented for this cartridge. They do not simulate model training or the reported extraction method. What the rooms ask you to notice is narrower: the same instruction can have a different result from a different starting position. Play in the browser or download the NES ROM.