The rapid capability gains of frontier language models are widely attributed to improved reasoning abilities, yet this cannot be verified as raw CoT traces in closed-source systems are hidden.
By registering a simple custom tool through a standard API feature, we induce frontier models to externalize intermediate reasoning.
Because these traces may reflect post-hoc rationalization rather than genuine reasoning, we first evaluate against native CoT on open-source models and extend to closed-source frontier models including GPT-6 Astra.
We find that the extracted reasoning matches native reasoning performance and substantially outperforms no-reasoning baselines, across competition mathematics, science, and code generation.
We then characterize how frontier models structure their intermediate reasoning.
Across token efficiency, reasoning-step types, and induced reasoning trees, we identify systematic differences in how models externalize, compress, and organize reasoning.
We find that Astra exhibits token-efficient directed reasoning, selecting a correct trajectory earlier, while resolving elementary steps internally and externalizing only crucial reasoning.
These findings provide a behavioral lens on frontier-model reasoning beyond benchmark scores.