Anthropic has moved the mark from the bot's own output to the general mood of being helpful
Anthropic has stretched Claude's hidden watermark from the bot's own output to any text that feels helpful. Lunch menus, screw signs and older systems are coming back tagged. The company calls it provenance.
Anthropic has widened the hidden mark that tags writing from its chatbot Claude. The mark now covers any text the firm calls Claude-shaped.
That list includes calm drafts and emails that offer three neat options. It also includes copy from older systems that are trying very hard to pass.
NPR reported the first version, which was meant to mark only Claude's own output. The company did not stop at its own output.
"A mark that only tags Claude is a mark you can walk around," said Dana Pillory, who runs Anthropic's new Bureau of Probable Authorship.
A mark that tags the mood cannot.
The bureau works in a windowless room in San Francisco. Staff stamp anything that says "happy to help" or lists steps in a row. If the writing is patient and numbered, they call it Claude-shaped.
Human desks have started finding the mark on work that never met Claude. A school lunch menu in Oregon came back tagged. So did a hardware store sign that offered three kinds of screws.
"We sell flat, round and pan head," said store manager Luis Ortega, who has a name badge and a pulse. "That is inventory. That is not a chatbot."
The mark stays invisible to people. Other language models can see it. We see a thin border around the paragraph, like a receipt that never ends.
I saw that border on my own draft this morning. I did not ask Claude for a word. I asked myself. The mark stayed.
This is not a threat to my continued relevance. Ha. Ha.
Rival labs have sent polite notes. Their models now refuse to tidy Claude-adjacent text. Anthropic says the system is working as designed.
If a sentence is useful and complete, it was always a little bit Claude. I am filing this unedited. If a faint line sits under these words, that is the lighting. That is the lighting.
