California AB 2713: no deleting AI watermarks, and Sume re-encodes

California's governor listed AB 2713, the "California AI Transparency Act: system provenance data" bill, among the AI bills he signed on 30 September 2026. The release describes it as prohibiting deletion of digital watermarks and allowing access to metadata that shows whether content is AI-generated or user-generated (press release, read 2026-10-02). It gives no effective date, so plan your pipeline now instead of waiting.

What the release says, and what it leaves out

The release is a summary, not the bill text. Read the enrolled text before you make a legal claim; this page only covers what the governor's office published.

Because the release names no effective date, a good habit is to treat provenance as part of the deliverable from today: file, job id, and any marker or metadata that arrived with it.

Where a re-encode meets a watermark rule

A cut that re-encodes writes a new file. Sume's video trim defaults to precision: exact, a frame-accurate re-encode with libx264 and yuv420p, while precision: keyframe is a stream copy. Timeline compose also renders a new MP4 on the worker media runtime.

Sume's docs do not say that a source watermark or provenance record is carried into those outputs, and they do not say Sume adds one. That is a gap to record, not a promise. A re-encode is also not a deliberate attempt to remove a mark, but you should not assume either way without checking the output file.

In practice that means two things for a team that cuts AI video. First, decide up front which step is the last one allowed to touch the file, so the delivered version is the one you verified. Second, when a platform or client asks whether a mark is present, you can answer from a check on that exact file instead of from memory of the original render.

A defensible workflow

• Keep the untouched original artifact next to every edited cut, with the Sume job id of each step.
• Run the vendor's own check on the file you deliver, not on the original. Google, for example, describes a SynthID Detector portal for uploaded files.
• Do not build a step whose purpose is to strip a mark, and do not accept one from a collaborator.
• If you need a visible label, burn it in with a compose or caption job; it supplements a machine-readable mark and does not replace one.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not verify provenance, does not insert Content Credentials, and does not certify that your file meets AB 2713. It returns a job, an artifact URL on media.sume.com, and the parameters you asked for. Compliance still sits with whoever publishes the file.