Anthropic's 'Watermark' Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

Anthropic plans to implement watermarking in Claude by using steganography—subtly altering word choices during text generation to leave detectable fingerprints—despite originally claiming the watermark would be "imperceptible" and wouldn't affect text quality or meaning. Critic John Gruber argues this constitutes text adulteration that compromises writing integrity, and notes that Anthropic's initial announcement failed to explain the mechanism, only revealing technical details in a follow-up article.