C2PA
Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity — a metadata standard that records how an image was created and edited.
C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) is a cross-industry standard for content provenance. A C2PA manifest records the device or software that created an image, every edit applied since, and a chain of cryptographic signatures.
Adobe, Microsoft, OpenAI, Leica, and major social platforms support C2PA. Images generated by DALL-E 3 carry a C2PA manifest stating "AI-generated by OpenAI". Cameras like the Leica M11-P sign each photo with a C2PA manifest verifying it came from a real sensor.
Platforms read the manifest and apply labels accordingly. Instagram's "AI Info" label fires partly on C2PA presence. SynthGuard re-encodes the image, and a C2PA manifest is bound to the exact bytes it was signed over — so it does not survive into the export. That is a consequence of re-encoding, not a step aimed at the manifest.
Stripping C2PA is the easiest of the watermark / provenance signals to handle. It's also the first thing SynthGuard removes — before any layer-level processing.
Tools that address C2PA
Related terms
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