‘Here to Protect’: How This AI Safety Company Finds Unauthorized Deepfakes

Published: November 17, 2025

mohamed-nohassi-tdu54W07_gw-unsplash — Art by Mohamed Nohassi via Unsplash

By India McCarty

This AI safety company focuses on protecting everyone from deepfakes as generative AI becomes more commonplace.

“We are building the guardrails for what we think will be the future of the internet,” Kathleen Grace, Chief Strategy Officer at Vermillio, told Movieguide®.

Vermillio, a company focused on finding and tracing AI-use, stated their mission is “to unlock the unlimited possibilities of human creativity through cutting-edge authentication and the monetization of fully protected IP,” per its website.

The company uses Trace ID technology “to find unauthorized uses” of people’s likenesses, whether they’re famous figures or not.

Trace ID “was designed and built to eliminate all concerns around trust, copyright, and ethical practices in the realm of Artificial Intelligence,” with technology that “makes it possible to secure and authenticate your content, thereby creating trust and credibility in GenAI-created content.”

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“We’re seeing regular people…being deepfaked because this technology is moving so quickly,” Grace explained.

The Guardian tested the tech out, experimenting with Trace ID by running AI-generated images through the software. One image featured an AI image inspired by DOCTOR WHO.

“The DOCTOR WHO video matches 80% of Vermillio’s DOCTOR WHO fingerprint, implying that Google’s model has leaned heavily on copyright-protected work to produce its output,” the outlet reported. “The OpenAI video, taken from YouTube and stamped with the watermark for OpenAI’s Sora tool, was an 87% match, according to Vermillio.”

Grace told The Guardian, “We can all win if we just take a beat and figure out a way to share and track content. This would incentivise copyright holders to release more data to AI companies and would give AI companies access to more interesting sets of data. Instead of giving all the money to five AI companies, there would be this amazing ecosystem.”

For people worried about the possibility of their own image being used by AI without their knowledge or consent, Grace shared that there is a free version of Trace ID.

“You can get a sense of your AI risk,” she said. “They’ll send you back a score and say, ‘This is how likely you are to have something on the internet of your name, image, and likeness that’s unauthorized.”

Grace concluded, “We’re just here to protect people and build the right guardrails so that the generative AI world can benefit everyone.”

As deepfakes become an increasing problem, Vermillio’s Trace ID technology is a helpful tool that allows users to make sure their likeness isn’t being used by AI.

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