Do Not Trust Licenses You See: Dataset Compliance Requires Massive-Scale AI-Powered Lifecycle Tracing

Abstract: This paper argues that a dataset's legal risk cannot be accurately assessed by its license terms alone; instead, tracking dataset redistribution and its full lifecycle is essential. However, this process is too complex for legal experts to handle manually at scale. Tracking dataset provenance, verifying redistribution rights, and assessing evolving legal risks across multiple stages require a level of precision and efficiency that exceeds human capabilities. Addressing this challenge effectively demands AI agents that can systematically trace dataset redistribution, analyze compliance, and identify legal risks. We develop an automated data compliance system called NEXUS and show that AI can perform these tasks with higher accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness than human experts. Our massive legal analysis of 17,429 unique entities and 8,072 license terms using this approach reveals the discrepancies in legal rights between the original datasets before redistribution and their redistributed subsets, underscoring the necessity of the data lifecycle-aware compliance. For instance, we find that out of 2,852 datasets with commercially viable individual license terms, only 605 (21%) are legally permissible for commercialization. This work sets a new standard for AI data governance, advocating for a framework that systematically examines the entire lifecycle of dataset redistribution to ensure transparent, legal, and responsible dataset management.