tl;dr: This ICML 2026 position paper argues that calling intermediate tokens generated by LLMs "reasoning" or "thinking traces" is a harmful anthropomorphization rather than a harmless metaphor. The authors contend these traces don't actually reflect human-like problem-solving steps and shouldn't be treated as interpretable windows into model cognition, warning that this framing misleads both users and researchers. They call on the community to abandon such language to avoid questionable research directions and misuse of these models.