Apple has a lot of artificial intelligence tricks up its sleeve with its upcoming iOS 27 software release for iPhone, including a vastly upgraded Siri experience that taps into the world of large language models (LLMs) to increase efficacy. While Siri may be the headliner, it looks like the Cupertino, California-based company is also working behind-the-scenes on other AI-related technologies, too.

As first noticed by the folks over at 9to5Mac, references to a new feature called Apple Reference Image can be found in iOS 27 beta 5, with a dedicated splash screen also being unearthed. Apple Reference Image seeks to authenticate photos on your iPhone by determining whether they were snapped with an iPhone camera (as opposed to being AI-generated or manipulated in any way).

In its current state, Apple Reference Image appears to be an opt-in feature, sending image metadata and specific iPhone camera hardware telemetry to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute platform for safe, private, and anonymous verification. The tool is located under a new Reference mode that needs to be turned on within Camera settings in order to activate.

Brand

Apple

SoC

A19 Pro

Display

6.3-inch 1206 x 2622 pixel resolution Super Retina XDR OLED, 120Hz, HDR10, Dolby Vision, 1000 nits / 1600 nits peak brightness

RAM

N/A

Storage

256GB

Battery

N/A

The iPhone 17 Pro is Apple’s next-generation flagship smartphone, with a new aluminum unibody design, a full-width camera plateau, the A19 Pro chipset, and a 6.3-inch display.

The race to prove photo provenance

AI-generated imagery is more commonplace than ever

In today’s world of AI-generated content, it’s more important than ever to be able to prove the provenance or originality of still images. Apple’s hidden work to build out Apple Reference Image is far from the first instance of a tech giant attempting to tackle this monumental challenge — Google has developed SynthID for embedding secret watermarks into AI-generated photos, which is a system also used by OpenAI.

AI-generated labels are now available across various social media platforms, software applications, and operating systems, but reliability has always been an open question due to spoofing techniques. Apple’s approach seems to be a fortified one that focuses on user privacy, but it’ll have to be released to the public in order to prove its viability in the real world.

Of course, Apple itself hasn’t confirmed the existence of Apple Reference Image, and so it’s anyone’s guess as to if and when the feature might launch to the public. It’s certainly possible that it’ll land alongside iOS 27 this fall, but I’d wager to bet it’ll arrive in a 27.x release sometime down the road, perhaps in early 2027.