Andy Parsons
Andy Parsons is an applied AI researcher whose work gives creators and viewers ways to trace digital media and set terms for AI training. His earlier career included engineering leadership roles, a Tufts electrical engineering degree, and startups such as Workframe and Happify. At Adobe, he joined the Content Authenticity Initiative and worked on Content Credentials, C2PA verification, open-source tools, and research on provenance for video and generative AI. As of October 2026, he is Adobe’s Global Head of Content Authenticity; TIME included him in its 2025 TIME100 AI list.
- Now at
- Adobe Inc. and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity
- Works
- 8
- Citations
- 82
- h-index
- 4
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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Before 2020
An engineering career
His earlier roles included CTO of McKinsey Academy, co-founder of Happify, and founder of Workframe, acquired in 2019. He earned a BSEE in electrical engineering at Tufts and held technology leadership roles in web, service APIs, mobile apps, and data intelligence.
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January 2020
Joining Adobe’s CAI team
He joined Adobe as Head of Engineering for the Content Authenticity Initiative. The work focused on media provenance and giving creators verifiable credit for their work.
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2020–2022
Building provenance tools
In 2020, the CAI team captured its first photos with an end-to-end image-provenance system. Content Credentials entered a Photoshop beta in 2021, where users could view and attach provenance. Adobe later released open-source JavaScript, command-line, and Rust tools to create, display, and verify credentials.
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2023
A registry for training consent
With five coauthors, he published DECORAIT, a decentralized registry that lets creators opt in or out of AI training and receive rewards. The paper won the best paper award at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Media Production.
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2024
Provenance for video and genAI
Two papers carried the work into new media: one described a DASH player that displayed C2PA verification during playback, and the other examined metadata, fingerprinting, and watermarking as provenance tools for generative media.
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April 2025
An app for creator choice
Adobe introduced its Content Authenticity web app, which lets creators attach Content Credentials to images and signal that they should not be used to train AI models. Parsons said creators wanted a simple way to make this choice and gain more control over their work.
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2025
A place on TIME100 AI
TIME included him in its 2025 TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in AI.
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As of October 2026
Leading content authenticity
He is Adobe’s Global Head of Content Authenticity and a Steering Committee member of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, where he works on global media-provenance standards.
Sources and credits
Photo: blog.adobe.com; Andy Parsons; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: blog.adobe.com. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
- Andy Parsons
- Andy Parsons | ITIF
- Welcome Andy Parsons
- Restoring Trust in the Age of (Dis)Information: The CAI Year in Review 2020
- 2021 update from CAI: full of milestones and just getting started
- Adobe releases open source tools to fight misinformation
- DECORAIT: DECentralized Opt-in/out Registry for AI Training
- Integrating Content Authenticity with DASH Video Streaming
- To Authenticity, and Beyond! Building Safe and Fair Generative AI upon the Three Pillars of Provenance
- Adobe wants to create a robots.txt-styled indicator for images used in AI training | TechCrunch
- Program — Visual 1st
- Andy Parsons (Adobe/C2PA)