Building audio provenance for AI-generated content at the source with AWS

This article describes SENTINEL, an AWS pipeline that embeds cryptographic provenance watermarks into AI-generated audio at the point of synthesis and maintains a verifiable chain of custody through live-streaming media pipelines to meet EU AI Act Article 50 compliance by December 2, 2026.

• EU AI Act Article 50 mandates machine-readable provenance marking for AI-generated content in the EU with penalties up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover for noncompliance.
• SENTINEL operates across four planes: generation (watermark injection during synthesis), transform (signed assertions at each processing stage), registry (tamper-evident provenance storage), and recovery (edge API reconstruction).
• AudioSeal provides imperceptible 16-bit watermarking embedded pre-encoding; C2PA 2.0 provides cryptographically signed content-credential manifests; Amazon Bedrock Guardrails attests safety policy evaluation.
• Watermark survives codec transcoding, re-quantization, and gain changes but requires at least 1 second of audio for recovery via Lambda@Edge at the edge.
• Chain-of-custody assertions are appended at AWS Elemental MediaLive, MediaPackage, and MediaTailor stages, each signed with AWS KMS asymmetric keys and linked cryptographically.
• Provenance registry uses Aurora PostgreSQL for primary storage, S3 Object Lock for immutable archival, and OpenSearch Serverless for fingerprint-based fallback recovery when watermarks degrade.

SENTINEL provides a blueprint for embedding audio provenance at the source using AWS managed services to meet EU compliance deadlines and industry attribution mandates.