paperSeptember 2026Unreviewed

Watermarks Without Verification: AI Text Watermarking After the EU AI Act

Alexander Nemecek, Vipin Chaudhary, Erman Ayday

Abstract

On August 2, 2026, the obligations of Article 50 of the EU AI Act took effect, requiring generative AI providers to mark the content their systems produce and ensure it can be detected as AI-generated. Days later, Anthropic disclosed that every Claude model released after that date embeds a watermark based on SynthID-Text in all generated text, enabled by default with no user opt-out; Google has deployed SynthID-Text in Gemini since 2024. Users objected that the watermark degrades quality, parti

Cite

@misc{nemecek2026watermarks,
  title = {{Watermarks Without Verification: AI Text Watermarking After the EU AI Act}},
  author = {Alexander Nemecek and Vipin Chaudhary and Erman Ayday},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  eprint = {2609.09604},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09604}
}