We tracked AI key theft over 35 days. Here's what we learned

The authors seeded over 40 fake organizations with GitHub repositories containing working API keys and URLs for two honeypot LLM gateways (a LiteLLM-style one in New York and a separate router in San Francisco), then logged more than 3 million requests over 35 days. Of 179 published keys, 65 were used to fetch model lists and 18 to send prompts, with six keys accounting for 98.9% of leaked-key prompt requests, and 86% of that prompt traffic came from hosting infrastructure across 53 recorded ASNs. Traffic included relay and key-pool tooling, Telegram bot histories, browser-based key testers, and automated credential brute-forcing of default admin keys.