How Claude marks AI-generated content

Computer0

So this won't be happening in the US, but in the EU: " When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from. "

lorenzohess

> Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported. This should make it easier to catch cheaters who use Claude, right? Unless everyone runs their artifacts through some watermark and metadata sanitizer?

amelius

They should just replace the spaces by one of Unicode special space characters. Can it be circumvented? Of course. Will most people go through the trouble to circumvent it? No.

aabhay

I have had a hunch for a while now that (in addition to these tools), Anthropic has actually leaned in to Claude's distinctive manner of writing since it makes the text more obviously AI generated and thus less susceptible to misuse. That's not necessarily the same thing as a markov-style fingerprint but it could be a correlated factor.

case540

I don’t like the idea of hacking a response to contain a watermark. I also don’t like the idea of false positives detections coming directly from Anthropic. If people read more AI generated content, people will probably start writing more in that style

simonw

> When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. I'd like to know a lot more about how that works. A lot of my interactions with Claude return pretty precise text. If I ask it to edit a project and refactor a specific function in several places I know exactly what I want to happen, it will NOT be OK if those refactors have some kind of weird pattern baked into their text to act as a watermark. I guess this may be covered by this: > Content generated by Claude may not carry a detectable mark if, for example: [...] The passage is very short, leaving too little text for a reliable signal;

izonu

> We’re also working to enable users and other third parties to detect Claude’s embedded watermarks and provenance metadata. This seems to be similar in execution to Google's SynthID. I hope they release actual code the technically proficient can use, unlike SynthID which can only (afaik) be queried with Gemini's UI.

simonw

An interesting factor of this is competition. If Claude was the only model family they could ship a change like this and users who want to cheat (or don't like watermarks for other reasons) would just have to put up with it. In a world with many different competing models, the risk of losing customers to other providers over this is much more real. Maybe they've looked at the numbers and the portion of people who clearly use Claude to cheat on examples etc is so tiny that losing them to other providers isn't a problem?

dalemhurley

People with dyslexia and dystrophia, commonly use LLMs to proofread content. Even Anthropic admits this is a limitation.

singpolyma3

As if "AI generated content" even exists instead of LLMs being a piece of tooling that is directed by a human author.

benrow

I've heard that this kind of watermarking process works by biassing the statistical sampling towards a partition of the set of possible next tokens (red set and green set), at each position. It might only be a slight nudge each time, but over a sequence of tokens, the likelihood of repeating the bias by chance is increasingly improbable. The bias is different for each position and follows a defined RNG, seeded somehow predictably. Can be either an open algorithm, or not. If not open, then an API could be provided to determine if text is watermarked or not. How it applies to code - maybe it could be a subtle nudge to symbol names, etc, I'm just speculating (I only read about this in passing very recently).

ethin

Can someone help me understand how exactly this watermarking of text works? Given that text is, well, text, and not some kind of binary format, I don't see how any watermarking can work unless you insert characters which are invalid under Unicode. I further don't really understand how this won't be perceivable by assistive technology (the "watermark" will just appear as either unreadable characters, or if the watermark is mixed thoroughly enough into the text, it will scramble the text to any speech synthesizer and will make it really really obvious). Thus, I don't see how this wouldn't be insanely trivial to remove. And this is before we get into things being put on the clipboard. Sure, I can press the "Copy" button at the end of each response, but what I can also do is manually select the response and copy it, or only copy partial selections, or any number of other things. How does this "watermark" (or any "watermark" technology) take into account this? So, really, to summarize this: I see no way of this actually being technologically achievable unless we revise the very core of how computers work and encodings for textual information. So I'm very curious as to how this is actually supposed to work.

jp0001

OpenAI has been watermarking their images with C2PA for some time.

beambot

Yet another reason to support open-weight alternatives, I guess.

jp0001

You could flip bits in the font itself, but I'm really wondering how portable this is.

colesantiago

Good. They should make it easier, to detect slop so we can ignore it quickly. I hope Pangram makes an API or an extension to analyze a page to detect slop on a page and then closes the tab immediately. Nobody should be wasting time on garbage LLM output in code, text, image and videos.

drnick1

Seems like an awful idea. I hope that that "watermark" will soon be discovered, reverse-engineered, and that tools to remove it will appear.

svaha1728

I expect a “Prettier” for AI generated text in the near future.

GrayHerring

Wasn't enough to play cat and mouse with ad removal, now we can also do the same with watermarking.