C2PA achieves major milestone with Google to increase trust and transparency online

Today we are thrilled to welcome Google as the newest member of the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), the industry standard for combatting deepfakes through the use of metadata and provenance technology. Google will join the C2PA steering committee, playing a critical role in shaping the future of the C2PA technical standards, and crucially — it will help to further the adoption of Content Credentials, including by actively exploring ways to incorporate Content Credentials into its own products and services. This milestone partnership is a watershed moment in driving mainstream awareness and adoption of Content Credentials.

With digital content becoming the de facto means of communication, coupled with the rise of AI-enabled creation and editing tools, the public urgently needs transparency behind the content they encounter at home, in schools, in the workplace — wherever they are. In a world where all digital content could be fake, we need a way to prove what’s true. The C2PA’s Content Credentials, which acts like a nutrition label for digital content, provides the context around the content we consume, and gives us the tools we need to decide what to trust.

Now, with Google’s partnership, we have a monumental opportunity to increase transparency to billions of interactions with online content. Furthermore, Google’s industry expertise, deep research investments, and global reach will help us strengthen our standard to address the most pressing issues around the use of content provenance and reach even more consumers and creators everywhere. With support and adoption from companies like Google, we believe Content Credentials can become what we need: a simple, harmonized, universal way to understand content.

The next steps ahead are also critical. To develop a global standard for provenance, we need everyone to join and support this standard, to proliferate this technology and minimize consumer confusion about how they should interpret content. The C2PA is an open standard with open source behind it and has been created through a collaborative effort from technical industry leaders. Everyone can adopt it, and everyone should.

We also must begin the work of media literacy. Everyone needs to first understand that digital content can be faked, and that they should not trust implicitly everything they see and hear that is digitally made. Then, we need to educate the public that there are tools they can use to understand what’s true. Every consumer needs to adopt the culture of “verify, then trust”. Governments worldwide have a critical role to play in these literacy campaigns.

With more than two billion voters expected to participate in elections around the world this year, advancing C2PA’s mission has never been more critical. Now more than ever, responsible innovation and widespread, cross-platform adoption are paramount to ensure we can help consumers navigate an increasingly fractured and uncertain digital landscape.

What this means

Through our collaborative work across the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) open-source community, and the C2PA technical standards group, Content Credentials adoption has accelerated at an unprecedented rate. This has been reinforced with recent adoption of Content Credentials from partners across the digital ecosystem, including OpenAI, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Sony, Leica Camera, Nikon and many more. We’re also expanding the reach of Content Credentials to new surfaces by automatically embedding them into all Adobe Firefly-generated outputs created in Apple Vision Pro. Lastly, we were pleased to see Meta announce their plans to build on the C2PA’s industry standard solution to identify AI-generated images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

We look forward to a productive and ongoing relationship with Google as steering committee partners.

Why it matters and what’s ahead

Adobe’s work in fighting misinformation is helping the world confront challenges across new frontiers in manipulated and misleading media. Misinformation concerns are only intensifying with the recent spread of AI-enabled voice cloning technology that can produce convincing audio deepfakes. Adobe and C2PA are actively working within this space, as there is opportunity for good actors to apply transparency to audio content, particularly for creative and practical use cases. For example, the voice cloning startup, Respeecher, has embraced Content Credentials, allowing its users to provide consumers with transparency and context that Respeecher technology was used to create voice-cloned audio. This approach would help validate and secure the original audio source, which could help future proof when it’s shared online or on social media. This use case supports Content Credentials as a signal for what you can trust, before consuming or sharing. Continued implementation of Content Credentials into voice cloning software, generative AI models, social media platforms, camera hardware and mobile devices will be critical – especially as we all aim to ensure that these online communities and technological innovations are built on ethical foundations.

We also continue to actively collaborate with technology companies, social platforms, news organizations and policymakers to empower adoption and increase transparency as we work to safeguard the public against this threat. Through our active role in advocating for safe and responsible AI development and deployment, we look forward to continuing to work closely with governments and policymakers to develop policies, guidance and tools for authenticating digital content. We believe that strengthening public confidence in the integrity of official online government content through Content Credentials, will help enhance trust with constituents.

This is a pivotal moment, not just for our democracy today, but for years to come — and we’re proud to be at the forefront of the fight for a more transparent digital ecosystem. We will continue to have productive and encouraging conversations across industries and governments, and with today’s announcement, we’ve never been more optimistic about our path forward with Content Credentials and restoring trust online.