Bye Bye Perspective API: Lessons for Building and Governing Measurement Infrastructure
Perspective API closes at the end of 2026, removing the de facto standard for toxicity measurement and exposing researchers' dependence on a tool they did not control. Drawing on this case, we argue that a research field must build and govern its own measurement infrastructure rather than borrow it. Surveying 241 papers that use or study Perspective, we show what depending on it cost the research community: claims reaching past what the tool could support, results that shifted when its model was silently retrained, and disparities researchers could measure but not explain. These failures were amplified throughout the LLM lifecycle, where Perspective supplied the labels, filtered the corpo...
| Authors | David Hartmann, Manuel Tonneau, Angelie Kraft et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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