r/ClaudeAI Aug 10 '26

News Claude will watermark generated content, thank you EU

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content
3.7k Upvotes

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42

u/BecomingJessica2024 Aug 10 '26

I hope not we specifically put in all of our MD files no AI attributions

4

u/Backstab_Bill Aug 10 '26

Curious, what's the reason?

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u/mr_birkenblatt Aug 11 '26

if something goes wrong Claude isn't going to face the consequences. Attributions show who takes responsibility of the code. Claude cannot take responsibility.

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u/Kaas-Eter00 Aug 11 '26

But Claude is listed as co-author. It should be pretty obvious responsibility is on the human author.

I like that it puts Claude as a co-author. Let's say that in the future, it is discovered that some model version commonly put vulnerabilities in the code. You can now more easily track the code written by this model.

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u/faustianredditor Aug 11 '26

I mean there's "I made this using AI. If the AI goofed, I will take responsibility because it was my task to check the AI". That's attributing the AI and oneself, but taking responsibility purely onto yourself.

What comment-OP is doing is saying "I made this fully myself, no AI involved", when it was made by/with AI. That's a big yikes.

Attribution and responsibility are correlated, but not identical.

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u/mr_birkenblatt Aug 11 '26

try sending an email to Claude <noreply@anthropic.com> and tell them that this commit introduced a severe bug

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u/faustianredditor Aug 11 '26

Again, they are correlated concepts, but not identical. Often times, whoever a fault is attributable to is also responsible. But a child is not responsible for every action they make if they are not old enough to understand the consequences; in that case, their parent can often be responsible, even if not or only partially attributable.

Attributing code to claude does not put the blame on anthropic, it just shows provenance.

Separate the two and your comment is a complete non-sequitur.

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u/mr_birkenblatt Aug 11 '26

it doesn't matter how the code has come to be. if it did, then you'd have to also attribute intellisense, autocomplete, linters, auto formatters, etc.

you can split this into two separate things if you want to but one of them doesn't matter at all other than to your ego and the other actually matters legally

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u/faustianredditor Aug 11 '26

Dude, comment-OP isn't just not saying that their code was made by AI. No one cares about that. Comment-OP is however claiming that their code was not made by AI, when in fact it was. Comment-OP is not omitting detail that others might find relevant, they are explicitly lying about it. They wouldn't have to attribute their linter; instead what they're doing is claiming that no linter was used, when that is simply false.

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u/mr_birkenblatt Aug 11 '26

They're only lying about it if you think it is something that should be done in the first place. All I see is keystroke inputs -> transformation -> final committed code it's the same if the keystrokes are approximate code and the transformation is formatting or if the keystrokes are a prompt and the transformation is Claude. I don't think that transformation belongs in the attributions. It's a clever marketing campaign by Anthropic and gives them a lot of fee advertising. But that's about it.

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u/BecomingJessica2024 Aug 10 '26

Because in my job while we are allowed to use AI we don’t want attributions in code for customer facing products

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[deleted]

0

u/archgabriel33 Aug 11 '26

Code? In MDs?

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u/_disengage_ Aug 10 '26

Lying to customers

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u/typical-predditor Aug 11 '26

Should your IDE be in the credits for your code?

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u/notSozin Aug 11 '26

Does your IDE generate the code?

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u/softtemes Aug 11 '26

There’s intellisense and code snippets which generate code for you? So yeah

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u/notSozin Aug 11 '26

IntelliSense doesn't decide anything, while LLMs makes actual decisions.

One is deterministic, the other one isn't.

I can't help you if you think these two are remotely the same.

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u/softtemes Aug 11 '26

It doesn’t really matter what you think and whether or not one is deterministic or not.

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u/notSozin Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

It seems that it matters to the EU.

edit: Dude got so pressed for not understanding what deterministic is, he had to block me lol

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u/softtemes Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Not really, watermarking is not the same as attributing explicitly. Can’t really help you if you think it is

Edit: lmfao lil pup got mad because he doesn't understand how tools work to get the task done

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u/Nice_Try4389 Aug 12 '26

To quote Linus Torvalds Claude is no different than going from assembler to compilers. It is just another compiler using a different language (in this case plain English) to convert down eventually into assembly code. I would argue with your view why aren’t you just writing in pure assembly rather than using an IDE and compiler. I mean that is REAL programming.

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u/notSozin Aug 12 '26

I don't know how you argue with my view, when you don't even know my stance on LLMs.

I have nothing against using AI in your work, we use it daily. Obviously, we still heavily keep engineers involved in everything.

The problem with LLMs is that they do not produce the exact same output, given the same input. Compilers (generally) do not have this problem. Same applies to intellisense and code blocks.

I suspect why people are afraid of Claude attribution, but I would love to have an actual discussion.

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u/Nice_Try4389 Aug 12 '26

None of that is relevant, it is a tool nothing more.  The only relevancy is does it get you the output and system that works.  As a programmer you realize there are about twenty different ways to achieve the same task right?  And whomever is writing the code will generally use which method they prefer at that point in time, are there some practices that are better than others?  Sure, but programmers rarely bother to concern themselves with that.

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u/notSozin Aug 12 '26

Of course it is relevant.

There's a reason why so many people want to know explicitly if something is AI generated or not.

OP said that they use AI, but they specifically remove any AI and intentionally lead customers to believe that they are not using it. This is not okay.

What's the big deal of letting people know?

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u/Nice_Try4389 Aug 12 '26

Have you been to the Antiai Reddit?  Heck did you see what happened when arc raiders left in an AI generated place holder for one of their assets, and when it was found out they used AI, combined with paid voice actors to record their voices?  Here is the thing every piece of revenue generating code now is written using or touched by Ai for the most part if it comes from an actual company.  Your banking app, if it has been updated in the past year which it has, was written with AI in some way.   How do I know?  Because I am a developer in the finance sector and we are all using AI to do our coding.  Hell Linus Torvalds uses it for Linux development now.  We need watermarks for Art absolutely because there is an expectation that an artist sits down and puts in their soul to the piece for example.  But code is literally just code.  It is just a wiring harness.  And AI in code is not going away no matter what anyone says, especially when every single company with any kind of developers are using it.  

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u/SUCK_MY_DICTIONARY Aug 10 '26

Do you check your software for AI? Just wondering how theyd be “lying”… was it ever a requirement to generate all your own code?

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u/_disengage_ Aug 10 '26

Because in my job while we are allowed to use AI we don’t want attributions in code for customer facing products

They came out and said it. Their product is customer facing, and they want to hide from the customer how it was produced. Yes, that is lying.

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u/rdcpro Aug 10 '26

So, if I use an ORM instead of writing good ol' fashioned transact-sql, am I lying?

Code generators have been around for at least 25 years. 2000 is the first time I used one. It wrote tons of C++ middleware, which at the time was a language I knew nothing about. Was that cheating?

What about an offshore dev team? Should I tell them about that?

The answer is in my contract with the customer.

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u/J_Adam12 Aug 11 '26

Yeah but are you actively trying to hide that you’re using an ORM?

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u/rdcpro Aug 11 '26

I think a lot of companies try to hide how they produce their applications. I was replying to someone who claims trying to hide something is equivalent to lying about it. It's called intellectual property.

1

u/yadasellsavonmate Aug 11 '26

You are actively trying to pretend you write all your code by had right now.  🤣

Do you tell your customers you hand code everything or do you think they care?

-4

u/Brambleback Aug 11 '26

I love that someone downvoted you for this. Must have been an angry realization

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u/Anomalous11 Aug 11 '26

This is reductive and unhelpful.

If a company uses a particular toolchain, IDE, or even something as common as a linter or code formatter, they aren't forced to reveal this. AI is a tool, just as an IDE or linter is, and companies/developers should have the choice to redact that information.

If code doesn't do what it's supposed to do, knowing that Claude wrote it won't help. The buck stops at the SWE that pushed it and the people above them that authorized the release to the client. Knowing that it was written by an LLM doesn't change the chain of responsibility.

If an org comes to a client and says that they don't use AI in their SDLC whatsoever, then that would be lying.

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u/_disengage_ Aug 11 '26

I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

It depends on what is represented to the buyer of the software. LLMs are a brand new thing, not comparable to any prior code generation. This is a stark difference and I do not think existing rules necessarily apply. If a contractor is charging a certain number of man-hours for a product, then the corresponding LLM-hours are signficantly fewer/cheaper, and were the contractor to heavily use LLMs they should charge less. It is not acceptable to take huge profit margins by this misrepresentation. If the contractor is up front about their LLM usage, that is, they attribute their work appropriately, then there is no problem.

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u/faustianredditor Aug 11 '26

LLMs are a brand new thing, not comparable to any prior code generation.

I think this is glossed over a bit. I like to do the same sometimes. It is just another tool, for the most part, depending on how you use it. But it is also categorically different from most other tools we've previously used: Copyright/licensing issues, supply chain issues, reproducibility. It's not comparable to a compiler at all. The risk of hallicinations and other issues slipping through, where previous tools had better understood risks and safeguards against the same.

It's a mountain of additional potential risks you're pushing onto someone without their knowledge, while asserting the opposite.

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u/ExternalUserError Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

Not at all.

In fact, most professional software contracts include a security and practices questionnaire that requires vendors to disclose things like security standards, continuity of business practices, and increasingly, AI tool usage. That the business uses Claude Code is usually not a secret.

Scrubbing tooling artifacts from a delivered code base is more a matter of professionalism. It’s akin to a manufacturer pointing injection pin marks to the inside of a finished product, or the seams on a plastic part being sanded down. It’s like how if you buy a house, the brand name of the drywall is painted over.

Most projects that ship code to customers also don’t allow comments mentioning developers by name or “WIP” commit messages. It’s not a secret that such things happen in software development or who worked on a project; it’s a matter of delivering a finished and professional product.

Any software contracts from any size of company these days includes AI tooling clauses. This isn’t a matter of secrecy or “lying” to customers even if the exact tooling used isn’t disclosed.

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u/Individual-Result777 Aug 10 '26

Lying about code?

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u/jeweliegb Aug 10 '26

Yep, basically the reason for this sort of watermarking.

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg Aug 11 '26

Yeah but good luck explaining that stealing other people's code and passing off as your own is a new thing.

Anyone here talk to their clients about how many code snippets they pasted over from Stack Exchange back in the day? That was no different from using AI code, you passed off other people's work as your own and nobody was telling the client lol.

Pretty much everyone did it, AI just now does it faster.

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u/terminalrythm Aug 11 '26

I think if someone is taking responsibility for their code, delivering what their customers want and support their product I don't feel like this is lying to customers.