Some Claude users say they are cancelling paid subscriptions after Anthropic announced on Aug 14 that future versions of its AI models will automatically add invisible watermarks to AI-generated text, a move the company says is necessary to comply with the European Union\u2019s AI transparency rules that went into effect Aug 2.<\/p>\n
Dozens of Claude subscribers on X criticised the decision, expressing concerns that content generated or revised with Claude could still be identified as AI-assisted even after the text is reworked, reformatted, or incorporated into another piece of writing.<\/p>\n
Some critics described the policy as \u201ca conspiracy against innocent Claude users.\u201d Others characterised the watermark as a modern-day \u201cscarlet letter,\u201d a mark that could remain identifiable long after any piece of AI-assisted text leaves the platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho will get caught? You,\u201d a user named visionode wrote in a lengthy post on Reddit. \u201cThe student who used Claude to reorganise a paragraph. The journalist who asked the AI to summarise a two-hundred-page transcript. The writer who had creative block and asked for synonyms. Those guys come out of the process with a digital tattoo on their forehead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anthropic disputes that characterisation. The company said the watermark \u201ccarries no identifying information and can\u2019t be traced to a specific person, organisation, or chat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new watermark, based on Google DeepMind\u2019s SynthID-Text technology, allows AI-generated text to be identified without a visible label. Instead, it embeds a statistical pattern into ordinary word choices made by the model. The pattern is invisible to readers, Anthropic said, but can be picked up by someone using a verification key to determine \u201cthe likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company said editing can affect whether the watermark can be detected, but acknowledged that minor revisions are unlikely to delete it. \u201cLight editing probably won\u2019t remove the watermark completely,\u201d Anthropic said. \u201cA complete rewrite where every word is replaced will.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company said it also plans to release a watermark-detection API, a cloud-hosted service that would allow third parties to identify Claude-generated text. The company did not say when it would become available.<\/p>\n
The controversy coincides with Anthropic\u2019s decision not to release its experimental Model 2 system, which the company said has shown \u201ca noticeable improvement\u201d over Mythos, its current flagship system, on \u201cmany tasks relevant to internal use.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs part of our standard R&D process, we internally train and evaluate many different exploratory versions of models that we don\u2019t intend to release,\u201d Anthropic said in its August risk report. \u201cModel 2 is one of these.\u201d \u2013 Inc.\/Tribune News Service<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some Claude users say they are cancelling paid subscriptions after Anthropic announced on Aug 14 that future versions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24,53,3154,182,130,1109,134],"class_list":["post-145933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-anthropic-claude","tag-claude","tag-internet","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}