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Regurgitation

By Updated

A model reproducing memorised training data verbatim, including personal data, whether prompted deliberately (training-data extraction) or not 1. Detected by output checks and canaries, and tested by extraction evals.

Developed in
ch. 19, AI-specific privacy breaches
Chapters
ch. 19, Privacy & AI · ch. 20, Existing Law
Contrast with
Hallucination
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

2 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Membership inference

    An attack that determines whether a specific person's record was in a model's training set from the model's behaviour.

  • Model inversion

    An attack that reconstructs features of training subjects, such as a face, from a model's outputs and confidence scores.

  • Personal data breach

    A breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration or unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data, notified…

  • Training, validation and testing data

    The three data sets the AI Act defines for high-risk systems: training data fits the model, validation data tunes it and guards against overfitting, and…

  • Evals

    Automated tests of a model's or agent's behaviour (capability, safety and adversarial), run as controls, not as one-off research.

Sources

  1. [1] "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models" (Carlini et al.; verbatim training sequences extracted, incl. personal data; arXiv 2012.07805). arXiv. 2020-12-14. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Regurgitation. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/regurgitation. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026regurgitation,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Regurgitation}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/regurgitation}
}