C2PA
DEFINITION
C2PA is the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a technical standard for attaching cryptographically signed metadata to media files that records their origin and edit history.
WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE
C2PA data, often called Content Credentials, travels with a file and can show whether an image was captured by a camera, generated by an AI tool, or edited afterward, alongside who made those changes and when.
It is a voluntary industry standard, not a law, backed by companies including Adobe, Microsoft, and camera manufacturers, and increasingly used by news organisations to flag authentic versus synthetic imagery.
It intersects with regulation without being one: the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency duty for synthetic content can be satisfied in part by C2PA-style provenance signals, though the Act itself does not mandate this specific standard.
AN EXAMPLE
A wire photo agency embeds C2PA credentials into every image its photographers submit, recording camera model, capture time, and location. When a manipulated version circulates online later, editors can check the credentials to confirm the original was unaltered.
WATCH OUT
C2PA metadata can be stripped by platforms that do not support the standard, so its absence does not prove a file was faked.
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