LLM API Security in 2026: How to Inspect AI Traffic and Protect Your Keys

Two things happened in August 2026 that most developers missed. Researchers from the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute published a paper showing they could recover the hidden reasoning of frontier LLMs — from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google — by replaying encrypted thinking blocks into weaker models. Around the same time, an engineer named Rafael put GitHub Copilot behind a MitM…