C2PA

C2PA, short for Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, is a shared format for content credentials: a cryptographically signed note travelling with a photo, video or audio file that says which device or tool produced it and what was done to it afterwards. Camera makers, Adobe, OpenAI and others support it.

The weakness is that C2PA lives in the file’s metadata, so it can be stripped, sometimes deliberately and sometimes just by uploading to a platform that discards metadata. That is why it is increasingly paired with an invisible watermark like SynthID, which stays inside the content itself.