Claude to start watermarking AI-generated text – but will it make quality worse?

Anthropic is adding watermarks to Claude's text output to comply with EU regulations requiring AI-generated content to be marked starting in December, by making subtle, undetectable changes to word choices. Critics like tech blogger John Gruber worry this will reduce writing quality by constraining the model's word selection, though computer science professor Steven Murdoch argues the impact will be negligible since LLMs already make random choices between similar words and adding a detectable pattern shouldn't noticeably change their output.