CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.SEcs.AI2026-07-22

Don't Trust the Label: License Laundering in AI Supply Chains

James Jewitt, Hao Li, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan

AI artifacts move through a multi-platform supply chain, spanning datasets and models on Hugging Face and applications on GitHub. While each artifact carries a license whose obligations should propagate through redistribution, no study has yet measured whether those obligations survive the chain or are stripped and replaced as artifacts move downstream. We trace 232,270 dataset$\rightarrow$model$\rightarrow$application chains and quantify two forms of license laundering: when artifacts with no declared license acquire definitive labels downstream, and when one declared license category replaces another during redistribution. We find that 62.3% of chains pass through at least one artifact with no declared license (concentrated in a small set of foundational datasets), and that every obligation-bearing license category falls below 7% end-to-end survival while the Permissive category reaches 95.1%. Based on these findings, we provide actionable recommendations for practitioners, model publishers, rights holders, and platform owners.

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcs.SEcs.AI2026-07-01

Skills Are Not Islands: Measuring Dependency and Risk in Agent Skill Supply Chains

Changguo Jia, Tianqi Zhao, Runzhi He, Minghui Zhou

Agent skills package reusable operational knowledge for Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet as they grow in scope, they become dependency-bearing artifacts whose identities, versions, and provenance remain implicit. This opacity already causes duplicated dependencies and incon…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.SEcs.AI2026-07-19

A Large-Scale Measurement of AI Bill of Materials Completeness in Hugging Face Models

Md Erfan, Ahmed Ryan, Md Rayhanur Rahman

Pretrained machine learning (ML) models help developers build ML-intensive software systems without training models from scratch. However, model repositories often provide incomplete machine-readable documentation about model provenance, licenses, datasets, limitations, and exter…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.SEcs.AIcs.CRcs.IRcs.LG2026-07-18

How Do You Choose Your AI Component? An Interview Study of Secure AI Integration in Practice

Mahzabin Tamanna, Elizabeth Lin, Sparsha Gowda, Laurie Williams, Dominik Wermke

The increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as AI components in modern software systems introduces distinct security risks to the software supply chain. While many considerations and safety mechanisms are in place for components of the traditional software supply chai…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.SEcs.AIcs.CR2026-06-25

A Deterministic Control Plane for LLM Coding Agents

Padmaraj Madatha

LLM coding harnesses grant agents broad file and shell access, yet the configuration layer that steers them -- rules files, agent definitions, IDE-specific markdown -- is largely unmanaged. A prevalence study of 10,008 public GitHub repositories (n=6,145 agent config files) finds…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CRcs.AIcs.SE2026-07-03

LLM-Enhanced Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning for Malicious Python Package Detection

Hang Gao, Xiaoyu Chen, Baoquan Cui, Zhen Tang, Peng Qiao, Fengge Wu, et al.

Malicious Python packages have become a major threat to software supply chain ecosystems due to the widespread adoption of open-source repositories such as PyPI. Existing learning-based detection methods struggle to capture the hierarchical organization and heterogeneous interact…

View free PDFSource page