The IPTC has published version 2.0 of its guidelines, providing updated pathways for publishers to opt out from unauthorised content use by AI engines.

Access the updated guidelines here on the IPTC website.

This version addresses the rapidly evolving AI landscape by incorporating two protocols introduced in late 2025:

• Really Simple Licensing (RSL) specification
• Cloudflare’s Content Signals protocol

The new version also includes some formatting changes to make the recommendations easier to understand and implement, and adds a chapter with suggested User Agent IDs to use in robots.txt files.

While the IPTC continues to advocate for a formal global standard through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), these guidelines provide a practical, immediate framework for publishers to protect their rights today.

The IPTC advocates for a usable, practical AI usage protocol to be explicitly acknowledged
by law… we have created this guidance document to show how current
technologies can be used to reserve the rights of content creators.

A Call for Industry Participation

The IPTC has joined the IETF AI Preferences Working Group to ensure the interests of rights holders are represented. This comes at a critical time: as the Open Future Foundation’s January 2026 study highlights, the group faces significant challenges in reaching an agreed position. Without active participation from the media and content industries, there is a risk that the final specification will fail to address the sector’s specific requirements.

In the absence of a formal industry standard, RSL or Content Signals may become de facto solutions. While these proprietary technologies may offer short-term utility for the content industry, the IPTC believes that a formal, open standard is a better long-term outcome. A multi-stakeholder process via an organisation such as the IETF ensures that the needs of all parties — publishers, rights holders, AI developers, tech platforms and civil society — are balanced in a transparent and sustainable way.

IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn presented on IPTC’s work in content provenance and authenticity at the Reimagining DAM conference in Munich, Germany, last week.

The conference is organised by Digital Asset Management software vendor (and IPTC member) Fotoware for its customers and others in the industry who are interested in their work.

As Fotoware’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Janniche Moe said in her introduction, we are now in a world where we can’t answer the most basic questions about content: “Where did this come from? Can we use it? Can we trust it?”

C2PA, and the IPTC’s work to make it workable for the media industry, addresses that problem.

Quinn’s presentation focused on the threat of fake news and misinformation to the media industry, how C2PA can solve the problem, and how IPTC is helping media companies to implement C2PA Content Credentials in a simple way by “stamping” content with their publisher signature.

To learn more on this topic, attend the IPTC Spring Meeting and the IPTC Media Provenance Summit in Toronto, Canada in April 2026.

The full agenda for the IPTC Media Provenance Summit has now been announced, including the world’s foremost experts on C2PA and content provenance in the media industry.

In collaboration with CBC / Radio-Canada, the IPTC is hosting the next Media Provenance Summit, which takes place at the Reuters building in Toronto, Canada on Thursday 16 April, 2026.

A small number of attendee places are still available. Those interested in attending can fill out the form at the event page. Preference will be given to representatives of the media industry in the USA and Canada.

All the greatest minds on C2PA in one place

We are honoured to have some of the most respected figures in the world of C2PA and content authenticity in the room for the event.

Here is a selection of our speakers:

• Angela Pacienza, Executive Editor at The Globe and Mail and Board member of the Online News Association (ONA) will be speaking about the need for C2PA and content authenticity technology at news providers
• Dan Dzuban, Head of Strategic Partners, Content Authenticity at Sony Corporation and Acting Chair of the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity (C2PA) will speak about the latest work of C2PA and where things are heading in 2026 and beyond
• Andy Parsons, Global Head of Content Authenticity at Adobe Systems, Inc. and lead of the Content Authenticity Initiative will speak about his work leading the Conformance Program, driving adoption across industries and building support for C2PA across the Adobe product suite
• Kate Kaye, Deputy Director of World Privacy Forum will shine a light on security and privacy issues that are being considered during the rollout of C2PA Content Credentials and related technologies
• Judy Parnall, Head of Standards & Industry, BBC Research & Development at the British Broadcasting Corporation and Steering Committee member of C2PA and Laura Ellis, Head of Technology Forecasting at BBC will speak about the BBC’s work in content authenticity and C2PA, including the work of BBC Verify
• Marianne Fjellhaug, Senior Project Manager at Media Cluster Norway will be speaking about her work with Project Reynir analysing workflows and commissioning user experience research on how users perceive Content Credentials and how it influences their trust of news brands
• Marcos Armstrong, Senior Specialist of Content Provenance and Integrity at CBC / Radio Canada will be speaking about his work on planning C2PA touchpoints across CBC’s newsroom workflows
• Bruce MacCormack, Chair, Media Provenance Committee at IPTC and Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC will be speaking about the IPTC’s efforts to bring C2PA Content Credentials, and provenance technology generally, to the global news media industry
• Tim Murphy, CEO, co-founder of Pixelstream who will be speaking about CAWG and how publishers can make use of Identity Assertions in C2PA
• Mohamed Badr Taddist, C2PA Project Manager at the European Broadcasting Union, Sebastien Testeau, CBC / Radio Canada and Marcos Armstrong from CBC will be speaking about a case study project they are running using Sony broadcast cameras through newsroom production workflows

More information about the event can be found at the event website.

The IPTC and CBC/Radio-Canada thank Reuters for providing the event venue and Getty Images for sponsoring catering at the event.

Indicator, an online publication focusing on studying and exposing digital deception and manipulation, has published an updated analysis of how Generative AI tools output are shown on social media platforms.

The study, an update to a previous study conducted in October, shows some good news: for example, all image and video content created by OpenAI models was correctly labeled as AI-generated by LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.

However, some significant gaps remain.

For example, some images from Meta AI were recognised as AI-generated by Instagram, but they were not recognised by LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube. Meta AI uses IPTC’s Digital Source Type property in the media file’s XMP header (the typical way to use IPTC Photo Metadata) to signal AI-generated content, so this means that the IPTC DigitalSourceType property is not being examined by these platforms.

OpenAI and Google Gemini both use C2PA metadata to assert digital source type (also using IPTC’s Digital Source Type vocabulary, but this time embedded in a C2PA manifest). However Pinterest, for example, only picked up OpenAI’s version of the C2PA metadata, but not Google’s. Pinterest did surface Meta AI’s content via the IPTC Digital Source Type tag, and was equal-best overall, tying with LinkedIn who recognised all content from Google and OpenAI but not from Meta.

IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn was quoted in the article as saying “Tech platforms have the talent to implement C2PA tomorrow; they simply need the will to prioritize it.”

Why not both?

On the creation side, OpenAI and Google Gemini declare AI-generated content using IPTC’s Digital Source Type vocabulary embedded in a C2PA manifest. (Unfortunately they each use different versions of the C2PA spec, so results are not consistent across all social media platforms, even those that read C2PA metadata.)

Meta AI uses the same vocabulary, embedded in the Digital Source type property in “regular” IPTC embedded photo metadata.

We would recommend that all AI engines uses both techniques, to give their AI disclosure information the greatest chance of being surfaced by all platforms.

On the consumption side, it seems that Instagram examines the IPTC DigitalSourceType property but not C2PA. Conversely, LinkedIn examines C2PA but not IPTC. Pinterest seems to be the only platform that looks at both, but it’s implementation doesn’t analyse the more complex C2PA metadata assertions used by Google, meaning that it only surfaces OpenAI’s simpler implementation.

“Whether they want to or not,” platforms are “just going to have to deal with this”

The article noted that looming legislation from California and other jurisdictions would force platforms to implement AI surfacing properly, but in the meantime there is a risk: Maurice Jakesch, assistant professor of computational social science at Bauhaus-University in Weimar, is reported as saying that “an inconsistent and incomplete labeling setup may have unexpected consequences on online trust.”

Bruce MacCormack of Neural Transform, who has worked with CBC/Radio-Canada on establishing C2PA, joined a panel in Geneva launching an initiative from the World Intellectual Property Organisation: the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Initiative (AIII).

Pronounced “A triple I”, the initiative seeks to bring together representatives from creators and rights holders across industries to work on a common approach to ensuring that creatives are compensated for AI use of their content.

Bruce MacCormack is Chair of IPTC’s Media Provenance Committee, which is working on bringing C2PA technology to the news media industry. Bruce spoke about how his experience at CBC in establishing C2PA can help to bring the industry together to create a set of policies and technical solutions to address an industry-wide problem.

A featured speaker was award-winning musical artist Imogen Heap, who spoke about the importance of metadata for the music industry and creatives generally and of her Auracles project bringing artist data together . Asked if she was optimistic about the future of creative industries, Heap said that she had to be hopeful, because the livelihoods so so many creatives across so many art forms depended on it.

Other speakers at the event included Chris Horton of Universal Music Group, Mark Isherwood of music interoperability standard DDEX, Ana da Motta, Senior Manager Digital Affairs & Artificial Intelligence for Amazon Web Services, Alessandra Sala, Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Shutterstock, along with Ulrike Till, Director and Kenichiro Natsume, Assistant Director General of WIPO.