GoKawiilFuture Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark. This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text, and we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act.
In this article, we share answers to some of the questions we’ve received about how our chosen watermarking method works, whether it affects Claude’s outputs, and why we’re making this change. To summarize:
We use a method of watermarking that does not have any practical impact on the quality or content of Claude’s outputs;
The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers;
Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters;
Watermarking doesn’t require extra tokens, and will not be more expensive;
Watermarking carries no identifying information and can’t be traced to a specific person, organization, or chat;
Watermarking won’t be specific to Claude. As of August 2, the EU requires AI providers serving its market to mark AI-generated content. Other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.
What is watermarking?
Large language models like Claude work by generating one word at a time. Each time the model decides on the next word, it chooses among a list of potential candidates, ultimately selecting the most sensible or likely based on the preceding text. Take the sentence “The weather today was cold and…”. The next word is very unlikely to be “sugary.” But it is quite likely to be “overcast” or “grey.” Under most circumstances, it doesn’t matter much to the reader which of these latter two words the model ultimately chooses—the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way. In cases like this, the choice is settled by a random number.
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