C4 dataset includes sites trafficking in pirated, hateful and surveillance content
Date: 2023-04
Affected: Downstream LLM users
Attack vector: model-poisoning
Category: real-world
Severity: Medium

Washington Post analysis of Google's C4 dataset (used to train T5, LLaMA, and others) found inclusion of pirate sites, white-supremacist forums and Russian propaganda outlets, exposing how unfiltered training corpora propagate harmful and copyrighted material into downstream LLMs.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):