Content Credentials (CR) icon

How to read it

Content Credentials are a standard from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), formed by Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic. The C2PA introduced the icon on 10 October 2023: a minimalist pin with the letters CR, open for any company to use. The pin itself only signals that the content has information about its provenance, its origin and history. Moving the pointer over the pin, or clicking it on LinkedIn, opens what the C2PA calls a digital nutrition label. The C2PA owns the icon’s trademark, and its design guidance says the pin stands for pinning credentials to a file.

Also searched as: C2PA, content credentials pin, CR icon.

What the label shows

The C2PA lists the publisher or creator, where and when the content was made, the tools used, whether generative AI was used, and edits made along the way. LinkedIn, which shows the pin on images and videos (as its help centre describes it, September 2026), displays four parts: a statement of whether AI was used to generate or edit any part of the content, the app or device used, who issued the credential and when. The statement comes from whoever signed the credential. Naming the creator is optional: the Content Authenticity Initiative, the Adobe-led group that builds open-source tools for the standard, says creators aren’t required to include an identity.

What it does not tell you

The C2PA says Content Credentials make no judgment about whether content is true. They show whether the provenance information is well formed, untampered and signed by a trusted signer, and the C2PA adds that provenance alone cannot tell you whether content is true, accurate or factual. The Content Authenticity Initiative says the credentials aren’t meant to show whether a piece of content is “real”. The record can also be incomplete: a crop made in a tool that doesn’t support the standard may not be recorded, and the metadata can be removed. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology notes that a signature cannot verify that the metadata is accurate, only that the signer attested to it. Google warns about the opposite mistake: research shows that when only synthetic content is labelled AI, people wrongly assume unlabelled content is not AI, which is called the implied truth effect.

Where you’ll see it

The C2PA named Adobe, Microsoft, Publicis Groupe, Leica, Nikon and Truepic among the first companies to adopt the icon. Leica’s M11-P was the first camera with Content Credentials built in, and Nikon said it would add them to its cameras starting with the Z6III. Google’s Pixel 10 phones, from 2025, attach them to every photo taken with the Pixel Camera app. Some platforms read the credentials and show their own label instead: TikTok uses them to label AI-generated content automatically, and YouTube and Meta read C2PA data for their AI labels (see "Made with AI" label).

Look-alikes

The C2PA set out to make the pin as recognisable as the copyright symbol ©, and its design guidance counts it among attribution symbols such as the copyright and Creative Commons marks. The © is a C in a circle; the Content Credentials mark is a pin shape containing CR. Meta’s "AI info" label is a text label that may come from the same C2PA data, and the EU’s AI icon is the letters AI.