Tech analyst Ben Thompson dismisses the 'clearly absurd' concept embedded in AI watermarking

Anthropic has divided some in tech with its plans to watermark output from its AI models, which it said was needed to comply with an EU AI regulation.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images Tech analyst Ben Thompson says he doesn't like AI watermarking.

Anthropic announced earlier this week that it would watermark content generated by its Claude tools.

Thompson of the popular "Stratechery" newsletter said the plan both goes too far and not far enough.

Tech analyst Ben Thompson says requiring AI companies to be transparent about the content their models produce is missing the mark.

Thompson tore into the European Union AI Act, which Anthropic cited as the reason it will add watermarks to content in Claude-generated files and text.

In his widely read "Stratechery" newsletter , Thompson said such AI transparency requirements are both overburdensome and unlikely to be strong enough.

"I am sympathetic to the impetus behind watermarking: wouldn't it be better to know what is fake and what isn't?" he wrote .

"What, though, is 'fake'? If an LLM states a true fact, and a human a fable, does it matter that the latter doesn't have a watermark?" Anthropic's plan, which it announced earlier this week, has deeply divided the tech community .

The AI giant said that Claude models launched after August 2 would support watermarking from the start and it is working to add such support to older AI models.

Thompson took particular issue with Anthropic adding a watermark even if Claude was used only for proofreading.

The EU's regulation allows for an editing exception, but technically speaking, Thompson said there was no way for Anthropic to distinguish such usage.

"I'm glad I never developed the habit of copy-and-pasting proof-reading runs (I use LLMs for proof-reading, but manually make every individual change in my text editor), but it hardly seems fair that anyone who wants to fix their grammar runs the risk of having their original content labeled as AI; the same frustration applies to translation," he wrote.

OpenAI, which currently watermarks images and audio, has also pledged to expand the process to text output, though the exact details of their plan have not been released.