20 August 2026

Claude watermark removed within hours of rollout

First reported

Prompt Engineering Daily and Wired ran this on , all on the same day.

  • Anthropic added invisible watermarks to Claude text to comply with EU rules requiring AI-generated content be machine-detectable, with fines up to 3% of annual revenue for non-compliance.
  • Developer Guillaume Meyer published code removing the watermarks within four hours, gaining 20,000 bookmarks on X and over 100 contributors adapting it for their own projects.

How it was covered

Reported by Wired