AURA – European Infrastructure for Proof of Origin & Provenance (AI Act aligned)

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.