Acquire Rare, Compliant Training Data (EU AI Act)

For data teams in labs and annotators, the equation has changed: easy public text is largely absorbed, and the frontier for training is now on the rare – verbalized expertise, physical world gestures, under-served languages, specialized visuals. Sourcing this rare data reveals a hidden cost: compliance.

The European AI regulation mandates a summary of training data, and the published template model reveals a decisive asymmetry (Mayer Brown analysis, 2025). For web-scraped content, you must document the most voluminous domains – up to the largest 10%, and 5% for an SME. For data licensed from a third party, it essentially suffices to confirm the existence of the agreement and the relevant modality. The declarative burden is therefore significantly lighter for licensed data than for scraped data. In addition, on the Generative AI side, there's an obligation to declare several categories of sources, respect rights reservations, and document the removal of illicit content: provenance becomes a compliance requirement.

Concretely, licensed and traceable data offers you three things: a license agreement that proves access, traced provenance that constitutes the traceability chain, and respect for rights reservation that reduces litigation risk. In a context where litigation around non-licensed data is multiplying – large settlements and ongoing lawsuits (IPWatchdog) – this de-risking has direct value.

The question remains where to find the rare, and how. This data is held by operational SMEs as a byproduct, not on data marketplaces. The right channel is a structured connection: a deal room with brokerage mandate, confidentiality agreement, and license, which connects the buyer to the holder compliantly. The first concrete step: tell us which modality and data profile you are looking for, so we can reach out to the holder.