# Researcher says Paint embeds remote-issued IDs in local AI images

_Monday, August 24, 2026 at 11:28 AM EDT · Security · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![Researcher says Paint embeds remote-issued IDs in local AI images — Primary](https://xusheng.dev/posts/reversing/mspaint_invisible_watermark/social-preview.jpg)

A reverse-engineering report says Microsoft Paint's local image-generation path sends prompts and styles to a remote moderation service, which returns a GUID used as an invisible watermark in generated images. The report says Paint also requests a C2PA manifest and that the manifest's soft-binding value matches the watermark identifier. It says the visible-watermark setting does not govern the invisible watermark, while Microsoft discloses C2PA metadata for AI-generated images.

## Sources

- [Hacker News: Front Page](https://xusheng.dev/posts/reversing/mspaint_invisible_watermark/main/)

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Retrieved: 2026-08-26T03:51:13.088Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)