At work I have a co-worker who frequently gives me credit for the accomplishments of my female colleague. I am acting primarily as a consultant on the project where as she and her team are the ones primarily responsible for the work. The person managing the project frequently credits me for ideas and results that came from her and her group in meetings. In smaller meetings, I try to make a point of crediting her and her team for the work wherever possible, but this is difficult when he does it in larger meetings. The larger meetings are more of a "presentation style" format where he will, in passing, credit me for work I did not do. The only way to correct the record in those meetings would be to wait until the end to awkwardly stand up and say "actually that passing remark you made wasn't me it was [my colleague]", so not really an option.
The project lead doesn't only give me credit for her ideas (though that is the most troubling), he also seems to generally give me credit I don't deserve. In ideation meetings, he will toss out an idea himself and then follow it up with "but I'm sure OP has already thought of that".
The whole thing is making me uncomfortable and I don't want my colleague thinking I'm stealing credit. I want to make sure he is assigning credit appropriately (particularly in the bigger meetings). Pre-covid, I might have tried "running into him" at the coffee machine and bringing it up in passing. Now however, we don't have any one-on-one type meetings where I could mention it (like I said, I'm just consulting) so if I wanted to bring it up I would have to schedule a meeting specifically to talk about this, which seems more confrontational than I would desire.
How do I get my this co-worker to distribute credit appropriately without causing friction or making him feel I don't appreciate his respect? This co-worker is considerably higher ranking than me, but he is also in a very different branch of the organization so there is no direct line to address this in the org level without getting senior leadership involved.
Note: I am asking this for my husband as he does not have a SO account, but I am reviewing.