A Content Credential is a signed note in the file. It is not a mark in the pixels.

C2PA — the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity — defines a way to attach a cryptographically signed history to a file. The usual public name is Content Credentials. The record lives in metadata: an APP11 / JUMBF segment on a JPEG, a C2PA chunk on a PNG or WebP, or a manifest stored with a document.

Nothing in that record has to change the picture you see. The pixels can be identical before and after the credential is written. That is the opposite of Claude’s text watermark, which lives in the words themselves.

The file cleaner deletes the embedded manifest and the metadata containers that carry it. After a clean strip, opening the file in an ordinary editor will not show a Content Credential. That is a verifiable fact: the bytes that held the note are gone.

It does not change how the image was made. It does not prove a human took the photograph. It does not speak to a statistical watermark in nearby text.

Some C2PA deployments keep a fingerprint of the asset and a copy of the manifest on a remote service. After the local label is removed, that fingerprint can still match and re-attach the history. The industry name for this is soft binding.

Gifi can promise the local credential is gone. It cannot promise a remote registry has forgotten the file. Anyone who says a metadata strip “erases C2PA completely” is skipping this part.