One of the world’s most respected camera makers, Leica, is looking to fight image manipulation by AI with a $9,500 camera.
As aimed at professional photojournalists, the Leica M11-P may be an expensive tool for capturing vivid and elegant images. But its cost also comes with a feature that seeks to authenticate every photo it produces—a watermark that it digitally embeds on its image’s metadata, which acts as a seal of authenticity.
At an era when photos can be digitally altered, tampered with, or made completely by artificial intelligence, Leica is looking at watermarking as a solution to the issue. It is essentially a process whereby identifiable assets are inserted into the image’s metadata, which serves as an eventual sign for authentication.

In a statement written as part of the M11-P’s product details, Leica highlights the increasing difficulty of verifying the “authenticity of visual content,” especially in the “age of digital photography.”
With the ability to put a watermark on every photo that its expensive camera makes, Leica is poised to not only boost the trust in digital content but also to re-establish the brand as an “authoritative tool in the documentation of world events”.
Expanding on the topic of watermarking, Leica describes it as “encrypted metadata in compliance with the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).”
An amalgamation of industry groups comprised of tech platforms, media companies, and NGOs, CAI is a trusted body committed to an open industry standard for “content authenticity and provenance”.
CAI’s model employs cryptographic asset hashing that injects recognizable signatures into metadata, enabling the process of verification of authenticity. As such, it can detect any form of manipulation, such as with the use of Adobe Photoshop or another editing program, and takes a record of the digital alteration in its system. Verifications can be done by plugging into an online portal linked to CAI.