Anthropic adding watermarks to AI-generated content, potentially making cheating harder | Latest Tech News
Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is adding watermarks to AI-generated content in order to comply with a strict new transparency law in Europe — drawing gripes from some customers.
The AI giant, identified for its Claude chatbot, linked the transfer to the European Union AI Act’s transparency code — aimed at serving to people distinguish human-made content from the AI-generated selection — which took impact on Aug. 2.
The watermarks seem robotically in AI-generated textual content, photographs and information, according to a assist web page on Anthropic’s web site.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief govt officer of Anthropic, during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, April 30, 2026. Bloomberg via Getty Images
“When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself,” the company’s web site said. “You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.”
Anthropic added that the watermarks will “travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing.”
The watermarks will probably be applied “wherever Claude is offered, worldwide,” including within the Claude Platform API, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Claude Tag.
Recent years have seen a growing refrain of lecturers complaining about rampant use of AI for cheating.
Anthropic’s new coverage prompted some to take to online boards to vent.
“This is such a massive blunder on Anthropic’s part,” one individual wrote on Reddit. “That mark will be the kiss of death on any piece of text that people can sell. People won’t want to pay for it. It will be a scarlet letter.”
Another commenter bluntly complained, “Claude watermarking our work is unethical and disgusting.”
Anthropic acknowledged that its detection program has “limitations” and might not always determine AI-generated content, particularly in circumstances where textual content has been “heavily edited, paraphrased, translated, or mixed into other writing” or the “passage is very short.”
The European Commission, the EU’s digital watchdog, has said it had “strong backing” from the tech industry in its push to clearly label AI-generated content so that customers aren’t misled.
As of July 31, the EU had secured commitments from almost 200 firms to comply with its transparency guidelines.
An Anthropic emblem is displayed on a smartphone next to a keyboard or a printed circuit board in Hawthorne, NJ, on Friday, March 6, 2026. Christopher Sadowski for NY Post
Aside from Anthropic, AI giants like Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Google and Microsoft all signed on to the pledge.
“By signing the code, providers and deployers of generative AI systems signal their intention to promote public trust in AI and to mitigate deception and misinformation,” the EU said in a press release.
The efforts by Anthropic and other firms come amid heightened considerations about the rise of so-called “AI slop” and AI-generated content being handed off as genuine.
Last month, a debut novelist’s $2 million ebook deal was canceled after a writer turned involved that he had used AI to write the manuscript.
One commenter dismissed Anthropic’s new coverage as “total bulls–t.”
Others identified that tech-savvy customers might have the option to discover workarounds.
It’s “hard to see what Claude’s watermarking approach really solves,” one individual wrote on X.
“There are already plenty of free and open-source models without watermarks, so anyone who really wants to avoid them can simply use something else.”
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