Apple announced at WWDC 2026 that it will embed Google DeepMind’s SynthID invisible watermarks into AI-generated and AI-edited images across its ecosystem, starting with iOS 27 later this year.
The move makes Apple the latest major tech company to rally around SynthID as a de facto standard for identifying synthetic media. OpenAI adopted the same technology in May 2026, meaning three of the most influential AI platforms on the planet now share a common watermarking language.
How SynthID actually works
The technology, developed by Google DeepMind, embeds imperceptible signals directly into the pixel data of AI-generated or AI-modified images. The watermark survives common image manipulations like cropping, compression, and resizing, persisting through the kinds of transformations that typically strip away traditional metadata.
By mid-2026, more than 100 billion images and videos have been watermarked using SynthID across various platforms.
