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Content provenance (C2PA)

By Updated

Signed, tamper-evident information about where a piece of content came from and how it was edited, bound to the asset. The C2PA specification packages it as a manifest of assertions, a claim and a claim signature 1; NIST treats provenance tracking as one approach to synthetic-content transparency 2.

Developed in
ch. 20, Deepfakes and synthetic media
Chapters
ch. 18, EU AI Act · ch. 20, Existing Law
Contrast with
Watermarking · Data provenance
Source
2 numbered references, listed below

Where it is used

4 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Deepfake

    Under the EU AI Act, a deep fake is AI-generated or manipulated image, audio or video content that resembles existing persons, objects, places, entities or…

  • Transparency

    In NIST's framing, how far information about an AI system and its outputs reaches the people who interact with it: what happened.

Sources

  1. [1] Content Credentials: C2PA Technical Specification, version 2.2 (a manifest of assertions, a claim and a claim signature bound to an asset). Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). 2025-05. https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/specs/C2PA_Specification.html (verified: primary)
  2. [2] NIST AI 100-4, Reducing Risks Posed by Synthetic Content: An Overview of Technical Approaches to Digital Content Transparency (provenance data tracking, watermarking, metadata recording and synthetic-content detection). NIST. 2024-11-20. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.100-4 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Content provenance (C2PA). In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/content-provenance-c2pa. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026contentprovenancec2pa,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Content provenance (C2PA)}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/content-provenance-c2pa}
}