Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- >But if we could see the sequence of all the moves after the game (and we knew the value of pi), we could work out whether this was a game that likely used pi to determine its moves. The game that used pi is, in a sense, “watermarked”.
Wouldn't pi contain any such sequence of numbers? Therefore you'd have to allow only certain regions of pi, and therefore, its not random anymore and we could just shortcut the whole game?
- Curious if you can prompt Claude to sue some scrambling scheme and then unscramble to defeat this.
E.g. prompt Claude to write all sentence in reverse, or swap every 2 words etc. Then use a script to put reorder in the right ordering?
by aleksiy123 - > We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.
Dumb question - doesn't this defeat the purpose of a watermark? i.e., anyone who wants to avoid detection can simply run `while (has_watermark(text)) text = slightly_rewrite_with_non_anthropic_llm(text)` until it's gone? I feel I am missing the intent of the watermark if it is so easily defeated.
by johnfn - I thought the same thing. Maybe they can restrict it so that you can’t run the same text through multiple times with only one word differences. At least from an IP perspective that would start to get really expensive to rotate through IPs to get around a block like that.by snowe2010
- > while (has_watermark(text)) slightly_rewrite...
I understand what you are trying to say but I am not sure any watermark detection API would definitively return a true/false answer, I would have expected something more like a numeric confidence value. I am also not sure if the API would be deterministic.
by omoikane - Not sure either why they are providing an API to detect either and what you say make sense.
However, if my understanding is correct, the reason for the watermark / detections is that its not directly aimed at end-users, but to be able from them to detect if text was produced by one of their models so they don't use it as input in training data. So, yeah, in that context, not sure why they are announcing this with an ability for anyone to detect if it was produced by one of their models. Also, they are happy to ingest text produced by models they don't own? Maybe someone with more information can elaborate?
by pan69 - Yeah kinda. You cant be confident a negative is true.
It doesn’t undermine positives though. That’s just whatever the false positive rate is.
So if it comes back as anthropic generated, it most likely is. If it comes back as non-anthropic generated, we have no idea.
If anthropic didnt make it public there would only be a narrow path for governments or something to make requests. Its kind of fucked either way.
by nonethewiser - It's completely pointless without an API, unless you're thinking the API should be private or restricted. The public needs some way of identifying the watermark.
> anybody who wants to avoid detection can just
They can just use a different LLM. By far easier and more reliable than what you're suggesting. This whole watermarking requirement is better then nothing because meant people are profoundly lazy, but yes it is not hard to work around with any effort.
- > anyone who wants to avoid detection can simply run `while (has_watermark(text)) text = slightly_rewrite_with_non_anthropic_llm(text)` until it's gone?
What do you think the pricing per call of "has_watermark(...)" will be?
https://x.com/i/status/2087235360690741690
An important principle: Never pay someone to remove a problem that they themselves created
by euio757 - by soupspaces
- Seems pretty easy to defeat by running text output through a random reworder process that would effectively repeat the same routine on low-stakes words, replacing them with similar ones. We learned this in high school, jumping through your paper and hitting random words with the thesaurus to 'sound smarter'by whalesalad
- That will likely make the text output worse and you'll have to fix it yourself. Regardless even if you don't fix it, at that point you're not really using Claude to generate the final output anymore.by yapfrog
- I’d like to better understand the minimum text length to get a confident result, i would presume it would need to be quite long, perhaps > 1000 words to get an accurate result.by visiondude
- From what I’ve read its closer to 100-300 words. And maybe 500 words to include info identifying the prompter.by nonethewiser
- a lot of side-channel information can be hidden in text, see https://arxiv.org/html/2510.20075v6 where they hide as much text as the source text itselfby WithinReason
- I’m entirely confident that this technically pointless, especially when you consider open models exist.
I believe they know damn well that this will lead nowhere, and are only doing this to mitigate criticism.
by brap - The vast majority of users are not sophisticated enough to try to erase the traces, so this will be effective for the vast majority of AI generated text that regular people are upset about. Eg. lazy student essays.by bonoboTP
- Opus 5 must be the pilot becuase it's writing style is so grating it has to be intentional. Let's hope they make it more subtle in the future.by jluysvi
- It does feel like it comes from somewhere specific. I mean maybe its just a diffuse set of reasons but it feels pretty abrupt.by nonethewiser
- Watermarking has no impact on style of writingby herywort
- > Google DeepMind tested this impact by serving a model that used watermarking to a portion of their Gemini traffic and comparing thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. They found no statistically significant differences from the unwatermarked model. And in a controlled study, human raters comparing watermarked and unwatermarked answers side-by-side saw no difference in quality.
For some reason I had assumed testing this would be more sophisticated than just checking the thumbs up/down stats and user "vibes"
- More unannounced testing on paying customers.by cube00
- It's not just checking user thumbs up/down. As your quote says, they also did a controlled study with people rating the results. What else would you want them to do? The whole point is that it needs to introduce a detectable statistical difference, but humans should not be able to perceive it as a quality difference.by jonas21
- How I use claude in my grant writing. I write a rough paragraph. I invoke /concise-mode skill (a supposed instruction that Claude used for their previous concise writing style), and ask it to revise for clarity. I re-read to ensure it says what I wanted, ask for another revision with a specific request, or manually edit.
This is a productivity enhancement for me. I am not writing art. I am delivering information for my research plan. While I would not mind a flag that indicated AI assisted for clarity, I do not want to be accused of using AI-wholesale. I put a lot of work into it, and I do not want to be maligned.
- We are very fortunate open source models have reached parity for virtually all non-coding use cases.by pr337h4m
- Do open "source" models have have this watermarking enabled? How do you know?by NewsaHackO
- Interesting. Here's the section of the EU Act that mandates this:
> Providers of AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems, generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Providers shall ensure their technical solutions are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as this is technically feasible, taking into account the specificities and limitations of various types of content, the costs of implementation and the generally acknowledged state of the art, as may be reflected in relevant technical standards. This obligation shall not apply to the extent the AI systems perform an assistive function for standard editing or do not substantially alter the input data provided by the deployer or the semantics thereof, or where authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/2026-07-27/eng
It definitely makes Pangram's job a bit easier.
by arjie