Provenance

What it is

Provenance is the recorded history of a piece of content: where it came from, what changed it, and who vouches for it. The C2PA specification defines it for media as the facts about an asset's history, bound cryptographically so the record travels with the file rather than sitting in a database somewhere behind it.

Why it matters

Claims need the same property in a different form — not a signature on an image, but a durable link from a published sentence back to its evidence and to the person who approved it. Content moves between surfaces, gets quoted, summarised and re-hosted, and the trail is what keeps it checkable at the other end. Without it, verification restarts from zero every time a claim is repeated somewhere new.