Google opens SynthID Detector to the public worldwide

Google announced on Oct. 7, 2026, that it was opening SynthID Detector to everyone worldwide in English, expanding beyond the media professionals offered an early version the previous year.

The company said the tool could check whether an image, video or audio file was made with AI from Google or its partners. It named OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao among those partners. Apple support was described as coming soon, without a launch date.

The underlying technology is SynthID, which Google launched in 2023 to mark AI-generated media with imperceptible watermarks. Google said it had watermarked more than 180 billion images and videos, plus 240,000 years of audio. Those are company-reported watermarking totals, not measurements of the detector’s accuracy.

The public release broadens access to the checker; it does not establish that the tool can identify every kind of AI-generated media. Google’s announcement describes checks for content from Google and partners, but makes no claim to universal coverage. It also supplies no accuracy or error rates and does not explain what users should conclude from a negative result. The scope of the announcement is wider access—not evidence of how reliably the detector performs.