Apple develops iOS 27 feature to authenticate iPhone photos

Apple is developing a new feature within iOS 27 to help users verify the authenticity of photos and distinguish them from AI-generated content or deepfakes. Discovered in the iOS 27 beta code, the feature is referred to as ‘Apple Reference Image’.

Under this system, users may be able to enable a specific ‘Reference Mode’ within their camera settings. Photos captured in this mode would include specialized metadata or a unique ID that serves as a digital seal of authenticity. This would allow recipients to verify whether an image was genuinely captured by an iPhone camera and has not been subsequently altered by AI tools.

The initiative aims to provide a hardware-level layer of verification to combat the increasing difficulty of distinguishing real photography from highly realistic AI-generated imagery.