The label is the part you own
A transparency duty that lands on whoever publishes, a practice that stops working when you enforce it, and a watermark whose own author says what it cannot show.
How we organise
Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act
Article 50 has applied since 2 August. Providers must build systems that say they are AI and must watermark what those systems generate. A deployer carries a separate duty: label AI-written text published on a matter of public interest without human review. Fines reach 3 per cent of worldwide turnover.
We tell a client that the deployer half is the half that lands on it, and we keep finding it assigned to nobody. The duty asks for a current answer to what was machine-written and went out unreviewed. That answer lives in the publishing workflow, not in the AI policy.
How we build
Fred Hébert on control and adaptation in systems design
One way of designing a system breaks it into parts and steers from the top. Another works on the interactions so that good behaviour appears without being specified. The same practice serves either. A review can hunt defects or spread awareness, and tightening it into a gate loses the second use.
Our position is that a practice copied from elsewhere disappoints because the artefact travels and the stance does not. The second firm may be getting a benefit nobody wrote down. Harden the practice and the benefit leaves, while the record shows a control being strengthened.
How we assure
What Anthropic’s text watermark can and cannot show
Future Claude models will carry a watermark that readers cannot see and that costs nothing to add. Anthropic is then plain about what it answers, which is how likely it is that Claude was involved. It cannot separate writing from heavy editing, weakens on short or factual passages, and a rewrite removes it.
We judge evidence by the weight it was built to carry. A duty to watermark will likely be read as one that settles authorship. Absence proves nothing, since another model leaves another mark or none. Put this to provenance across a body of work, never to a verdict on one writer.