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Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (“AI”) company which builds and distributes the popular Claude series of large language models, just set a potential trap which could affect millions of users, and most of them have no idea it’s there. The California-based company confirmed this month that Claude will weave a permanent, detectable watermark into its writing, a hidden fingerprint that survives copying, pasting, and even light editing. Nobody clicked “agree” to this. Nobody can turn it off.
Anthropic says the watermark is required under the new EU AI Act, a law designed to help citizens recognize when they are interacting with an AI system or exposed to AI-generated content. A separate set of voluntary guidelines that regulators treat as a safe harbor sets a rough exemption: AI-written passages shorter than about 150 words don’t need to be watermarked, because detection tools need enough words to distinguish an AI-written pattern from ordinary human writing that happens to overlap by chance. However, Anthropic chose to watermark everything Claude writes, even a single sentence. Anthropic also applied this approach worldwide, not just to users in Europe, likely sweeping in the everyday documents millions of people produce with AI help: academic papers, blog posts, school essays, cover letters, work emails, marketing copy, etc.
