AI Models Overthink Problems—and It’s a Security Risk

Jul 10, 2026

Researchers from Zhejiang University and Alibaba have developed an evolutionary algorithm that corrupts the logical structure of prompts, causing reasoning AI models to produce excessively long outputs—up to 26 times the normal length. This 'overthinking' attack acts as a denial-of-service on commercial models such as DeepSeek-R1, Qwen3-Thinking, GPT-o3, and Gemini 2.5 Flash. The findings were presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2026.

Why it matters: This vulnerability could allow attackers to degrade AI service performance and increase costs for providers, affecting user experience at scale.

Full story at: IEEE Spectrum / AI ↗