Sauropod Not Consulted Before Being Licensed As AI Training Data, Says Sauropod’s Lawyer

UBERABA, Brazil  A sauropod uncovered beneath a supermarket foundation in Minas Gerais was licensed as a machine learning training asset nine days after its discovery, in an agreement the animal did not attend and has not been paid under.

The contract, filed as Instrumento Particular de Licenciamento de Dados Paleontológicos 004/26, names the animal as the consenting party and reserves its likeness in perpetuity across all media now known or later devised. The specimen does not yet have a species name. Payments are held in escrow pending the provision of banking details.

“We asked for another fortnight on the animal’s behalf,” said Diogo Ferraz, 38, a field palaeontologist with the Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro who has worked the site since the first vertebra surfaced on 3 February. “The scanning crew arrived on the Tuesday with lidar rigs and a notary. They photographed the ribs, then the trench, then asked me to step out of frame because I was contaminating the asset. Nobody asked the animal anything. It has been down there quietly for ninety-two million years and the first thing anyone said to it was sign here.”

Roughly 61 percent of the skeleton remains in the clay. The scans, at 0.4 millimetre resolution, were ingested on 14 February and appear in the partner documentation as reference geometry for large quadrupedal motion. The animal is credited in none of them.

“Ninety-two million years of unlabelled information, sitting there, generating no value for anyone, including itself,” said Marcelo Pinho Andrade, vice president of data partnerships at the licensing firm. “We have brought it into the pipeline. The animal is discoverable now, which it was not before, and it will appear in roughly forty forthcoming productions without needing to be flown anywhere. If it wishes to renegotiate we are always at the table.”

Under Brazilian law, fossils recovered from federal subsoil belong to the state. The likeness question is unsettled, because nobody has raised it before.

“There is no counterparty,” said Ana Lúcia Bittencourt, a partner at a São Paulo firm engaged to represent the animal’s interests. “The estate is unrepresented, so we drafted the most generous terms we could on the animal’s behalf and the animal accepted them. My client waived audit rights, moral rights and the right to be informed. It is the cleanest rights position I have worked on in twenty years, and I have done reality television.”

The site foreman has resumed pouring concrete over the anterior third of the skeleton, having been told that everything of value was already captured, and that the remainder belongs to the animal.