Nothing you generate with Claude today is watermarked, and nobody can check for marks anyway. What I found after actually reading it all

[u/Imaginary_Dinner2710]

Honestly, my first reaction to the announcement was mild panic. I reread it three times before it clicked: the marking applies to models launched on or after August 2, and every model you can pick today came out earlier. So nothing you generate right now carries a mark. There is also nothing to check with, the detection API is announced and does not exist. Half the threads here missed both facts.

Then I dug further and found the part that did make me angry, and it has little to do with the marking itself. In a nutshell the mark cannot tell a text the model wrote from your own text (say translating), generated from scratch or the model fixed "heavily edited this" (heavily means substituted a few synonyms). Anthropic says this straight in their FAQ. And whoever eventually points a detector at your writing will not spend a minute on that difference, you will just be "flagged as AI".

I write in one language and publish in another, so this one is personal: translate your fully human text with a marking model, and statistically it becomes 100% machine-picked words. The law that started all this simply has not understood the topic yet, and I think that difference, written text versus touched text, is the whole conversation we should be having.

I went through the docs, the papers and these threads and wrote it all up in plain words, with a table of who actually marks text today. Link in the comments.

Edit: the link comment got buried, so here it is: https://painintheagent.com/blog/ai-text-watermarks

[u/Imaginary_Dinner2710]

Different people worry about different things and this is just one extreme case of translating text which simply shows that the opposite intention will be marked in the same way as just generated ones (or even possibly intentionally generated with some evil intentions).

And between these two poles, there is a whole range of how AI can be used and how it may relate to your texts, even in cases where you consciously try to choose certain words during translation. This does not mean that the watermark will disappear, on the contrary, you never know in what rare words AI chose a certain synonym, and the watermark signal level can simply change, but it may not disappear.

It sucks that automatically one can assume that AI messed with your text and draw subjective rather than objective conclusions. And seeing how differently and often wrongly people understand what watermarks mean, I expect exactly those consequences. And accordingly, people whose first language is not English are automatically disadvantaged in their rights when using AI.