I needed another reason to cancel my Claude sub. Thanks Anthropic!

This is akin to adding a giant watermark on things one would made with a free product "Made with XXX". Except you're paying $200/month for it, and there's no way to disable that watermark.

I don't disagree with EU regulations, but I strongly believe the onus should be on the content publisher, not the toolmaker. If the toolmaker watermarks whatever his tool produces, it opens a giant can of worms that cannot be closed. That means anything and everything you make with this tool is no longer fully yours, it contaminates everything and makes your work traceable. Who wants that?

I was already annoyed by the fact that Claude marked everything it did on my repos under its own account (I didn't ask for any of this), but now everything is invisibly marked, even the code. Not that I care that my writing would be watermarked, since I'd rather write my stuff myself, but code? No thanks.

Meanwhile I'm running a DeepSeek V4 Flash or Pro, or a Qwen3.8, and it writes my code without a peep. Resulting repos are clean, just the way I want them. No 'Claude' account, no watermarking, nothing. I won't be looking back after having tried these new models. Whoever makes good models that don't broadcast their maker will get my business.

This watermarking will simply push people more towards Chinese models. Keep pushing in the wrong direction Anthropic. Doing this right before an IPO is a great idea.

This is the yet another embarrassing idea from the EU they came up with, if they could focus less on dumb things and more on providing real support to the development of technology maybe we could have more healthy competition that will eventually lead to better overall technology in the hands of everyone instead of acting like dumb chickens and not just being passively useless but also stopping the real labs from doing the real work into doing this bs

A) without water marking, llm will poison the open internet and poison their own source of fresh new material. B) without watermarking, it potentially exposes an infinite deluge of garbage getting to people , fostering hate, eventually leading to dis-engagement, ergo destroying their training pipeline. C) ...Sadly, them water marking the claude chats with absolute dementia levels of output text is beyond me, i seriously can't tolerate this bullshit "randomly replace words with "similar" words", bs anymore, the output that claude makes right now is outright *corrosive* to my eyes, eventually leading to their training pipeline dying if devs dis-engaging ( of the 3 i think this one is the worst )

I think they need to get their shit-together and realize this is a death warrant for the tech ( in my opinion ).

I think it's pretty dishonest of Anthropic to frame their watermark as EU regulation compliance. The EU regulation, from my understanding, requires AI content to be labeled for human viewers. In the meanwhile the Anthropic new release on the watermark says this.

> The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark

Which is to say, it does not actually meet the EU AI act requirements which require transparency to humans. Not to mention that if the detection requires access to the base models, it makes anthropic the only entity who gets the say on if a piece of text comes out of Claude. Anthropic is both the player and the referee here.

If there is one takeaway you should have from this fiasco it is that you should be wary of using tools that doesn't serve your needs and your needs only.

Gruber is a smart, thoughtful man. This is a bizarre take from him.

It exhibits an undeveloped understanding of LLMs, and a righteous view that generated prose should assimilate... which should be offensive to organic intelligence.

Issues with the proprietary nature of Anthropic's watermarking aside, we will look back on this as a 'thank god' moment in the history of LLMs.

Such a stupid regulation. Don’t make the rest of the world suffer because of one dumb law passed for a fractional share of users.

This also, just another precedent of anti-user, pro Authoritarian, from LLM companies.

So Anthropic goes on the shit list with Sony Blu-ray and its cinavia watermarking.

His argument for needing it to write every word at its best is weak. The black box within can change quality at every moment based on many factors they he hasn’t known about, say system prompt, or other harness adjustments. Models get better every 2 months, and they write better, but he is comparing to what?

The real argument should be watermarking itself. I don’t want my shit water marked if I ask you to just rephrase a certain part.

The author makes a lot of great points. I find it surprising that somebody who has such a nuanced appreciation for the subtleties of language would be in the crowd complaining about the watermarking policy. I expected this kind of complaints from mostly students interested in academic dishonesty, who generally don't have enough command over written language to notice the slight decrease in output quality.

While I like that LLMs won't be able to produce the entire internet anymore, I am worried that the real reason for this move is for Anthropic to claim everything is theirs even though they STOLE humanity's collective knowledge including billions in private property worth of knowledge (or maybe even trillions), and all they do is regurgitate it, but now with a watermark on top as if it was theirs.