remove-ai-watermarks/docs/research-sweep-2026-09.md

Research sweep, September 2026

A survey of every area the library works in, run on 2026-09-22 and 2026-09-23 to find what changed since the topic pages were written and what earlier research missed. Nine areas were covered: Google SynthID, other vendors' invisible watermarks, the watermark attack literature, visible AI labels, metadata and provenance standards, video and audio, AI image classifiers, law and regulation, and fill or regeneration models with competing tools. Claims were checked against primary sources (specifications, vendor documentation, legal texts, arXiv pages); live captures from the maintainer's accounts settled several questions directly.

This page is an index. Each finding lives in its canonical page.

Where the findings went

Area	Change	Page
Law and regulation	Research purpose, no-liability notice, jurisdiction table (China, EU, India, US, South Korea), platform labeling behavior	legal-and-safety.md
SynthID adoption	100B+ items, ElevenLabs and OpenAI audio (with OpenAI's verification API limits), Apple (announced), Vertex C2PA, Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash, optional visible mark, portal status	synthid.md, provider-oracles.md
Other vendors	Microsoft Foundry provenance for Azure-hosted Flux and MAI, Amazon Nova Reel, audio adopters	watermarking-landscape.md
C2PA 2.3 and 2.4	c2pa.ai-disclosure and ingredient digitalSourceType now read; parser claim corrected	watermarking-landscape.md
Containers	GIF metadata stripped without re-encoding; TIFF and DNG refused; C2PA after large WAV and AVI data now scanned	known-limitations.md
TC260 in audio	WAV, MP3, OGG, Opus and FLAC label placements from the 2025-08 audio guide	supported-signals.md
Video labels	Sora discontinued; opening-only labels no longer filled over the whole clip; any video mark vetoed by another vendor's C2PA AI claim, Kling also by a non-Kling TC260 producer; TC260 video producers named	supported-signals.md, known-limitations.md
Apple	Image Playground and Photos Clean Up credits attributed	supported-signals.md
New visible marks	vidu video mark and wan image mark, each calibrated on one real export	supported-signals.md, known-limitations.md
Google Photos	AI edits reported as "Google Photos (AI edit)" rather than Gemini, with SynthID present: Google's checker found it in 4 of 4 Photos AI edits (Ask, eraser and two others)	synthid.md, supported-signals.md
YouTube	Upload test: C2PA-driven "Made with AI" label, public streams without C2PA, Studio downloads re-signed by YouTube; re-encoded non-Google video no longer read as Google AI with SynthID	supported-signals.md, legal-and-safety.md, module-internals.md
Audio	Generated audio from OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Microsoft passes through the video path unchanged	known-limitations.md
Attack literature	Fidelity band on open encoders now 30-45 dB; WmForger and WMCopier status	synthid-removal-research.md, watermark-forgery-study.md
Models	FLUX.2 klein has a strength-controlled pipeline in diffusers	chroma1-engine-research.md
Dependencies	TrustMark extra on every supported Python (trustmark>=0.9.2)	installation.md
Live captures	Gemini Omni, Grok, Vidu, Wan, Apple, Google Photos, Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash through the API; Runway, Higgsfield and Dreamina	watermarking-landscape.md

Open items

• Google Photos Reimagine manifests. Magic Editor, and so Reimagine, is not offered in Google Photos on iOS, so no Reimagine file is captured. The question it was meant to answer is settled without one: Google's checker found SynthID in all four Photos AI edits tested on 2026-09-25, none of which records SynthID in its manifest.
• Vidu and Wan marks on more samples. Both are registered from one real export each (vidu video, wan image); their gates are provisional until a wider cohort is measured, and a Wan video label is not yet captured. Public Vidu feed videos (2026-09-26) carry the TC260 label naming ShengShu, and one names Tongyi Yunqi as producer with Vidu as propagator, but none shows the visible Vidu mark; Wan's public demo videos show no mark either. Both marks appear only on account downloads.
• TC260 practice guides. The audio placements from TC260-PG-202510A are now read (the guide PDFs load in a browser from tc260.org.cn/tc260/sjzn/list.shtml, not to scripted requests). The text-file guide (TC260-PG-20258A) covers documents this image and video tool does not process. The security-protection guide (TC260-PG-202511A) records a SecurityData JSON object, a digital signature over the label and optionally the content, in ReservedCode1 and ReservedCode2. The library accepts those fields as label evidence but does not verify the signature.
• Experiments. Chroma restoration after regeneration (from the NeurIPS 2024 "Erasing the Invisible" winning solution, arXiv:2508.21072), FLUX.2 klein and Z-Image-Turbo as global stages (with an Apple Silicon arm through mflux), linear probes on newer frozen backbones for classify, Resemble Perth and Meta PixelSeal as benchmark oracles, re-watermarking as a removal primitive (arXiv:2605.16796, MIT code), RAVEN view-synthesis removal (arXiv:2601.08832, no code released as of 2026-09-24), and Apache-2.0 video inpainting (VACE, ROSE) against the per-frame visible video fill. MiniMax-Remover (CC-BY-NC-4.0 weights) and ProPainter (S-Lab License, non-commercial) are excluded on license.
• New C2PA signers without a vendor row. The C2PA conformance list names generator certificates Amazon Bedrock, Getty Images AI-Generated Image and AI-Modified Image (and the iStock pair), Jasper, RefaceAI, and vivo vivo Albums and JOVI Albums. It also lists Google Photos for both Android and iOS, the signer the Photos rule keys on. A real sample per vendor is still needed to confirm the manifest shape before adding a row. Runway is done: its own models sign as RUNWAY AI, INC. (measured 2026-09-24) and the row covers the conformance-list spelling too. Amazon is done: Nova Canvas and Nova Reel outputs published in aws-samples/amazon-nova-samples sign as Amazon Web Services, Inc. with claim generator Amazon Bedrock (2026-09-26), and had been reported as Canva because the byte fallback matched Canva inside Nova Canvas. A search on 2026-09-26 found no public Getty, iStock, Jasper, RefaceAI or vivo Albums file carrying C2PA: their marketing and model-page images are unsigned. A vivo X300 camera capture carries a vivo device manifest (digitalCapture) that the bundled reader cannot open (unknown algorithm).
• Chinese phone galleries. Huawei's help pages say the Xiaoyi photo-edit AI watermark can be switched off; Honor, OPPO and Xiaomi label behavior is not documented in any primary source found. vivo's Album setting is already covered.
• Claims not supported by a primary source. Kling embedding SynthID (repeated by remover blogs; Kuaishou is not in Google's adopter list), Hailuo pixel watermarks, and platforms stripping C2PA on upload. None is used by the library.
• Google Photos small edits (deferred). The "SynthID present" rule for Photos AI edits rests on four checked edits, none of them tiny. Still to measure on the phone app: a tiny eraser edit, a large one, a small "Help me edit" change, a restyle, and a crop-only control, each checked in Gemini. iPhone Mirroring does not show the Photos editing toolbar, and the web editor has no generative tool, so this needs edits made on the device.
• Captures blocked by region or device. Doubao, Jimeng, Samsung. Higgsfield, Runway and Dreamina were captured on paid plans on 2026-09-24.

Decisions

• Dreamina AI badge: not registered (2026-09-26). Dreamina stamps a small boxed AI badge top-left on images and video, and calls it its visible AI watermark. It stays unregistered for three reasons. A generic boxed AI is the shape of the disclosure icon the EU Code of Practice defines, which this project does not template, so a template would remove any such label. The same generic shape would match other platforms' badges and plain AI text and misattribute them to Dreamina. And it adds nothing to attribution: Dreamina exports are identified by their C2PA (ByteDance Media Transcode Service signer with a Dreamina/7.5.0 ingredient), and Dreamina's own "Remove watermarks" setting removes the badge. Revisit only if the badge becomes a distinctive brand mark.