Insights · Provenance

Content provenance and the deepfake era

December 2025 · 4 minute read

As AI-generated video becomes harder to distinguish from the real thing, the question for evidence is shifting from what the footage shows to whether you can prove where it came from.

That is the problem the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity set out to solve. C2PA, backed by Adobe, the BBC, Intel, Microsoft and others, defines an open standard for attaching tamper-evident provenance to a file: who created it, with what tool, and what was changed. The consumer-facing version is branded Content Credentials.

What provenance does not do

It is worth being precise: C2PA does not detect deepfakes. A synthetic clip made with a compliant tool can carry a perfectly valid manifest saying so. What provenance does is make authentic content easy to verify, so that footage lacking a trustworthy history stands out.

For legal and investigative work, the takeaway is old-fashioned. Provenance and authentication both come back to the original file and a date and time you can substantiate. New technology raises the stakes on getting that right; it does not replace it.