Verifiable Provenance and Watermarking for Generative AI: An Evidentiary Framework for International Operational Law and Domestic Courts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework combining cryptographic provenance, watermarking, and attestation to verify AI-generated content across legal regimes, supported by a public benchmark and evaluation metrics.

Contribution

It presents a unified evidentiary framework for AI content provenance, introduces a new benchmark dataset, and evaluates detection schemes for legal and operational robustness.

Findings

High true positive rates at fixed false positive thresholds

Robustness measured by area under the ROC curve

Legal sufficiency thresholds derived for various regimes

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence now synthesizes photorealistic imagery, audio, and video at a cost that defeats traditional forensic intuition. The legal consequences span three regimes studied so far in isolation: international operational law, domestic procedure, and product regulation. This article presents a unified evidentiary framework that maps cryptographic content provenance, robust statistical watermarking, and zero knowledge attestation to the proof requirements of each regime. We define a five tier threat model spanning naive regeneration, adversarial laundering, cross model regeneration, active watermark removal, and insider provenance forgery. We release a public benchmark of 12000 generated items across image, audio, and video modalities under six laundering pipelines for 72000 evaluation samples. We evaluate four representative schemes and report true positive rate at fixed false positive rate, robustness area under the curve, computational overhead, and a regime conditioned legal sufficiency score. We translate empirical detection bounds into legal sufficiency thresholds for command decisions under the law of armed conflict, for criminal and civil admissibility under domestic procedure, and for persistence audits under the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and analogous regimes. The result is a reproducible reference pipeline, a public benchmark, and model annexes that lawyers, engineers, and operators can deploy together.