It's getting harder to prove you're human — and this 'solution' is only making it worse

The useful part

Anthropic has started marking text generated by its newest Claude models with an invisible watermark that can travel with the text after it leaves the chatbot. Copy a Claude response into a document, paste it into a website, drop it into a codebase, and the mark may still be there. Anthropic says models launched on or after August 2 support machine-readable marking at launch, and the company is applying those markings wherever Claude is offered worldwide, while it is adding support to older models as well.

How it works

• American users who never asked for it are getting it anyway.
• Anthropic also deserves credit for attempting something more sophisticated than the current generation of AI detectors, which mostly look at finished prose and make an educated guess about whether a machine...
• Unfortunately, Anthropic's solution comes with a fairly spectacular collection of problems.
• The watermark does not necessarily prove Claude wrote the material carrying it.
• Rather than confining the system to the European market that created the requirement in the first place, Anthropic is rolling it out across Claude worldwide, including Claude Code.

What to take from it

Europe demanded a way to identify text, and an American developer using Claude to write software in Tennessee now gets his code fingerprinted too.</...

Details worth keeping

There is a perfectly defensible reason for doing this. Anthropic acknowledges that aggressive rewriting can remove it.