DeepMark’s Vigil Watermark Joins the C2PA Ecosystem

We’re excited to announce that DeepMark’s Vigil watermark has been registered on the C2PA Soft Binding Algorithm List as me.deepmark.audio.vigil.128.

C2PA provides a standard way to attach Content Credentials to media, so provenance can travel with content across tools and platforms. Soft bindings make that provenance more durable. A soft binding can help reconnect media to its Content Credentials, even if metadata is stripped, separated, or lost in downstream workflows.

That matters more than ever as AI-generated media becomes mainstream and transparency requirements tighten, including the EU AI Act’s transparency obligations, which will start to be applied from August 2026.

Our expertise at DeepMark is audio watermarking, and Vigil is exactly that: a neural audio watermark bringing robust, high-capacity, and high-quality watermarking into the C2PA ecosystem. Vigil operates at 128 bits per second, which is about 3.4 × 10³⁸ unique identifiers, far beyond what is needed to uniquely bind massive volumes of audio content.

The algorithm is still evolving, and we are continuously improving it. But, it already delivers robustness and audio quality in line with other well-known neural audio watermarking systems while operating at a substantially higher payload capacity. At the same time, it introduces near-negligible latency and operational overhead. Despite being neural, it can run in real time even on a standard CPU. Much like our watermark itself, its runtime footprint is almost unnoticeable.

We currently provide a live ingestion playground where users can upload audio, add Vigil watermarks, and generate/sign manifests with testing C2PA certificates.

Ingestion playground:
https://ingestion-api.deepmark.me

Bindings can then be resolved through our hosted Resolution API:

Resolution API:
https://resolution-api.deepmark.me

A few important notes:

• The hosted ingestion playground uses testing certificates, so signatures from it will not validate against a trust authority and should not be used in production;
• The hosted services are currently unauthenticated, so please do not upload sensitive or confidential audio.

Our goal was not just to register our own algorithm, but also to help accelerate adoption of C2PA soft binding more broadly, which is why we open-sourced both services here:

https://github.com/deepmark/c2pa-soft-binding-stack

as a working reference implementation that others can study, run and build on. We hope it will help developers, researchers and other stakeholders move faster when implementing real-world provenance workflows.