Advancing content provenance for a safer, more transparent AI ecosystem

Update October 5, 2026: We’re expanding this work to text in the EU, to comply with the EU AI Act. Learn more. Update July 31, 2026: We’re expanding this work beyond images. Supported audio generated with OpenAI tools, including through ChatGPT and the OpenAI API, now includes SynthID watermarking. Our public verification tool will now allow for verification of supported audio files in addition to images. We’re also introducing API access for verification, so developers and organizations can incorporate provenance checks into their own workflows. Together, these updates build on the multi-layered approach described below: combining open standards like C2PA, durable watermarking signals like SynthID, and verification tooling to make provenance easier to detect and use across more kinds of OpenAI-generated content.

People are using OpenAI’s tools everyday to create and edit images and audio in ways that make communication more expressive, useful, and accessible. As these tools become a part of how people build, imagine, and share, it’s important that people can understand and verify where the media comes from so they can interpret it with more confidence. Provenance signals can help by giving people context about where content came from, how it was created or edited, and whether it is what it claims to be.

Today we’re strengthening our approach to content provenance with a multi-layered, ecosystem-driven model to building trust online. We are making our provenance signals easier for other tools and platforms to recognize through C2PA conformance, adding durable cross-platform SynthID watermarking to images through a partnership with Google, and sharing a preview of a tool the public can use to verify whether images came from OpenAI.

Together these updates build on our earlier work ⁠ to support open standards, make OpenAI-generated content easier to identify, and collaborate across the industry to support a more trustworthy information ecosystem.

C2PA metadata is an important foundation for provenance. It helps content carry information about where it came from, how it was created or edited, and who signed that information. But metadata is not foolproof. It can be stripped, lost through uploads and downloads, or broken by transformations like file format changes, resizing, or screenshots.

At launch, the tool is limited to content generated by OpenAI. In the upcoming months, we aim to support cross-industry efforts to make verification possible across platforms. Over time, we also expect to support more types of content that people may encounter online.

OpenAI has been engaged in the development and adoption of provenance standards since 2024, when we began adding Content Credentials to images generated by DALL·E 3 ⁠ (opens in a new window) and later to ImageGen ⁠ (opens in a new window) and Sora ⁠ (opens in a new window) . We also joined the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), the cross-industry group behind the open technical standard for content provenance. C2PA’s technical approach uses metadata and cryptographic signatures to help information about a piece of media securely travel with the content itself. This information includes context that helps journalists evaluating a source, platforms making integrity decisions, and people trying to understand what they are seeing online.

We recently took the step of making OpenAI a C2PA Conforming Generator Product ⁠ (opens in a new window) . By becoming C2PA conformant, we are giving platforms a trusted way to read, preserve, and pass along the provenance information we attach to our content. This matters because provenance only works if it survives beyond the first platform where content is created, and conformance makes that possible.

To make provenance more resilient, we are taking a multi-layered approach and incorporating watermarking through Google DeepMind’s SynthID ⁠ (opens in a new window) , starting with images generated through ChatGPT ⁠ , Codex, or the OpenAI API. SynthID embeds an invisible watermarking layer that complements C2PA metadata-based approaches.