Romain Benabdelkader

AURA – European Infrastructure for Proof of Origin & Provenance (AI Act aligned) AURA is an open, neutral and interoperable European infrastructure and pre-standard designed to provide verifiable proof of origin, consent and provenance for digital and creative content in the context of AI systems. The objective of AURA is to address a structural gap in current regulatory and technical frameworks: while legal obligations around transparency, provenance and copyright increasingly exist (AI Act, copyright law, TDM opt-out), no shared, verifiable and neutral technical layer currently allows these requirements to be operationalised at scale. AURA is designed as a documentary and declarative infrastructure layer, enabling content origin and intent to be: • explicitly documented, • cryptographically verifiable, • independently auditable over time, • interoperable with existing identifiers and sector infrastructures. Key characteristics • Open and pre-standard infrastructure (no proprietary control) • Cryptographically signed origin and provenance manifests (JSON-LD) • Interoperability with existing identifiers and frameworks (ISRC, ISWC, DDEX, C2PA) • Alignment with EU AI Act transparency and provenance requirements • Compatibility with human-created, AI-generated and hybrid content • No watermarking, fingerprinting, DRM, monitoring or platform control mechanisms AURA does not aim to enforce rights, monitor usage or control platforms. Its role is to provide a neutral technical appendix that can support: • contractual relationships, • audits, • regulatory compliance, • cross-border interoperability. Project status • Public draft specification (v0.1) • Open GitHub repository under Apache 2.0 licence • Early reference implementations and technical explorations available • Governance designed to evolve toward a multi-stakeholder European model Digital Europe relevance AURA is positioned as a candidate European infrastructure and testbed for: • AI Act implementation support, • trusted provenance and origin documentation, • interoperability across cultural, media and AI ecosystems, • public-interest, non-commercial technical capacity building. The project is open to collaboration with: • public institutions, • research organisations, • collective management organisations, • standardisation bodies, • AI and content ecosystem stakeholders. Relationship with implementations AUTHENTICA is one of the initial contributors and reference implementations supporting the AURA infrastructure. It is not the object of funding, but a technical vehicle used to test and demonstrate AURA concepts in practice.