How is that a more fair comparison? The consulting firm in this case never promised you the interim reports, only the summaries of the reports. They also promised you the final output that the reports led to. You decided that report summaries + final output was worth paying for. You got exactly what you were promised.

I personally read the thinking traces to know if the model is on the right direction

I'm not saying they're not useful, of course they are. I am disputing that they are part of the agreed bargain between you and the proprietary LLM providers.

They explicitly do not promise reasoning traces. You (general you) agree to those terms and pay for that bargain anyways.

We "agree" to many things that are deeply unfair.

Yet we have the option to decide not to participate. That is an option.

I’m just driving by here but they bill by tokens — it’s a stretch to turn around and deny your right to see them. And it’s especially egregious when the tokens admittedly, routinely do the opposite of what you instructed.

But personally it’s not about right and won’t it’s just blatant bullshit.

And lawyers bill by 6-minute increments, yet that doesn't mean you get access to all of a law firm's internal discussions and notes about you and your case.

Just because you paid for the lawyer time/LLM tokens doesn't mean you get access to everything that happened within that time/tokens.

It’s normal for consulting firms to charge for inputs like hours of labor, airfare etc.

> but you’re charged for the report itself separately from the summary, and you are not allowed to access the unsummarized report

This analogy works if the LLM provider promises you access to the reasoning tokens, and fails if they don’t.