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An audit of 41 model releases across 17 families found later models routinely drop pretraining disclosures their predecessors had earned

AspireAI community · arXiv
*The interesting question is not whether a model discloses its training data - it is whether the next release keeps what the last one earned.* This document-based audit checks 41 model entries from 17 families against 24 pretraining-related indicators from the 2025 Foundation Model Transparency Index, then tracks what happened across 24 adjacent release comparisons in ten families. Scores fell in 11 of those comparisons, rose in 6 and stayed flat in 7, with 38 indicator losses against 28 gains overall. A stable total can hide the churn: OLMo-2 and OLMo-3 receive identical totals despite three gains and three losses, and Llama-3.1 improves on Llama-2 while losing credit for two data-related criteria. Corpus composition and training compute gaps persist. The limitation: this measures what is written down, which is a proxy for what was done - a model that trained on more data and disclosed less still scores as regressed here, and the authors argue for documentation that flags inherited information explicitly.
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