Auditing unauthorized training data from AI generated content using information isotopes

The rapid growth of AI systems has been fueled by large-scale human data, intensifying concerns over the unauthorized use of intellectual property and privacy-sensitive content during model training. Auditing such misuse is particularly challenging since mainstream AI services operate as black boxes, exposing only generated outputs while concealing their training and inference processes. In this work, inspired by chemical isotope tracing, we introduce the concept of information isotopes to trace training data within opaque AI systems. We propose an information-isotope tracing framework that selectively marks target data elements and detects their propagation in model outputs, providing concrete evidence of data utilization under black-box access. Experiments on thirteen AI models across six datasets demonstrate that our method distinguishes training from non-training data with up to 99% accuracy and strong statistical significance (p < 0.01) using approximately 4,000 words of evidence. An open-source tool is released to support practical data rights protection.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nature Communications
Published
2026-02-21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68862-x
Primary Topic
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Auditing unauthorized training data from AI generated content using information isotopes

Guoshun Nan, Nicholas D. Lane, Peiru Yang, Huili Wang et al.
Nature Communications
Scientific Computing and Data Management
article

Auditing unauthorized training data from AI generated content using information isotopes

Guoshun Nan, Nicholas D. Lane, Peiru Yang, Huili Wang, Yuchen Xie, Chuhan Wu, Jinhua Yin, Zhiyang Hu, Zhili Zhou, Tao Qi, Yongfeng Huang, Dongqi Cai, Lingjuan Lyu, Shangguang Wang
article en

Abstract

The rapid growth of AI systems has been fueled by large-scale human data, intensifying concerns over the unauthorized use of intellectual property and privacy-sensitive content during model training. Auditing such misuse is particularly challenging since mainstream AI services operate as black boxes, exposing only generated outputs while concealing their training and inference processes. In this work, inspired by chemical isotope tracing, we introduce the concept of information isotopes to trace training data within opaque AI systems. We propose an information-isotope tracing framework that selectively marks target data elements and detects their propagation in model outputs, providing concrete evidence of data utilization under black-box access. Experiments on thirteen AI models across six datasets demonstrate that our method distinguishes training from non-training data with up to 99% accuracy and strong statistical significance (p < 0.01) using approximately 4,000 words of evidence. An open-source tool is released to support practical data rights protection.

Nature Communications
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (CN), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK), University of Cambridge (GB), Flower Hospital (US), Guangzhou University (CN), Sony Computer Science Laboratories (JP), Institute of Wetland Research (CN), University of Hong Kong (HK), Tsinghua University (CN)
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 50%
Scientific Computing and Data Management
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