Google's SynthID system scored a rare public win this week, TechCrunch reports, after Snopes used it to debunk a widely-shared AI-generated image of Senator Mitch McConnell. The fake showed the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican covered in tubes in a hospital bed in extreme distress, fuelling speculation about his health after a June 14 emergency hospitalisation.
SynthID embeds an invisible signature into AI-generated images that survives screenshots and cross-platform sharing — the watermark was still detectable even after the McConnell image bounced between Reddit and X. Gemini models have included it since Google launched the programme at I/O 2025. OpenAI joined in May 2026, though Anthropic still does not participate, meaning images from Anthropic's tools carry no detectable signature.
McConnell has been largely absent from public view since his hospitalisation, creating fertile ground for the hoax.
Analysis
This is what SynthID was built for, and it worked. But the McConnell hoax also exposes the system's biggest gap: the watermark only works when the generating tool opts in. As long as one major lab sits out — and Anthropic currently does — bad actors have an obvious path around it. That's not a technical failure. It's a coordination problem dressed up as one.
