China: TC260 closed consultation on Guidelines on Identification Methods for AI-Generated Synthetic Image Content

On 6 July 2025, the National Cybersecurity Standardisation Technical Committee of China (TC260) closed its public consultation on the draft Cybersecurity Standard Practice Guide—Artificial Intelligence Generated Synthetic Content Identification Method: File Metadata Implicit Identification for Image Files. The consultation focuses on the draft technical guide, which is based on the mandatory national standard GB 45438-2025 Cybersecurity Technology—Identification Methods for AI-Generated Synthetic Content. The consultation sought feedback on proposed technical specifications for labelling AI-generated or synthetic images, including metadata storage in EXIF UserComment fields and PNG tEXt chunks. The Guide addresses formats such as JPEG, HEIF, and PNG, with appendices providing implementation examples for Android, iOS, Python, and C/C++ libraries such as libexif and libpng.