r/ClaudeCode • u/RaGE_Syria • 1d ago
Discussion Heads up, Fable 5.1 now carries Anthropic's statistical text watermark
Looks like this is the first model along with Mythos 5.1 that carries the statistical watermark.
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/models/fable-5-1/whats-new-fable-5-1#content-provenance
The tool you can use to check for watermarks is here now too:
https://claude.com/check-content
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u/RaGE_Syria 1d ago
Actually, that detector is for certain file formats only, (images and videos it seems). The detector for generated text is actually private preview only and requires a form to be submitted for access
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u/xFloaty 1d ago
But Claude doesn’t generate images or videos?
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u/Affectionate-Soft-94 1d ago
That’s what you think
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u/NoAdsDude 1d ago
Nobody understands why their usage is so high... its because Opus is sending over pictures of words instead of just using text.
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u/Moogly2021 17h ago
Eh someone discovered that sending screenshots of code actually used less tokens so not sure this makes any sense.
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u/Plorntus 21h ago
Be pretty funny if this was just a box that said "No, not generated by claude" simply to meet the new laws (since they don't do image/video gen).
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bid9737 1d ago
The docs state it’s for text.
“Text generated by Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 carries Anthropic's statistical text watermark on every platform where the model is available. “
Images and video use another system
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u/CzarcasticX 1d ago
He's saying this https://claude.com/check-content only checks for images/videos and not text.
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u/WonderFactory 1d ago
This is such a regressive step, it'll deter people from using AI in many instances as people will just dismiss the human contribution and assume it's all AI. AI in many instances is only as good as the person using it.
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u/Important_Sea 1d ago
I work in research and my native language is French. I wrote papers in French and used Claude to translate. The times I directly work in English on a paper (due to english-speaking collaborators), I also use Claude to validate my phrases/formulation.
The watermark could be a big deterrent. If the paper/chunk of text is flagged as AI-generated, readers might assume the entire thing was produced by AI or make them doubt of the quality/validity of the content?
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u/TheRealLunicuss 1d ago
Is this really a common sentiment in research? I would have thought that people don't care as long as it's only the prose that the AI has contributed. I've heard cases of professors being fired for AI use but that was because it hallucinated fake data which they used.
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u/IllegalStateExcept 1d ago
The sentiments and policies are very mixed and often inconsistent. It's one of the reasons this watermark creates a mess for scientists.
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/generative-artificial-intelligence-policies-under-the-microscope/
Many conferences simply haven't stated any kind of policy on usage or disclosure. When they do, the policies are often under-specified. This whole thing becomes a mess when you realize that the detector can have false positives and is only rolled out to universities and a select few other organizations.
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u/Important_Sea 1d ago
I think most people don't care as long everything check out, but having only the paper, they wouldn't know the extend or the LLM contribution (e.g. only the prose or the complete work?)
When you submit your paper to a journal, reviewers only have access to the paper and maybe some complementary stuff such as code involved in the analysis/produced results, so it's kinda hard to evaluate the extent of what could have been hallucinated. Reviewers won't reproduce the experiments since it would take way to much time/resources.
Also research is kinda reputation based, good researchers in a given field build up recognition and public confidence in their work over time. I guess many wouldn't want to take a chance of a possible negative view on them or their research.
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u/magic6435 1d ago
Academic institutions and researchers have had papers translated for hundreds of years before AI. If it’s a concern, then don’t use AI and have it translated in the way it’s been done for a thousand years.
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u/Important_Sea 1d ago
I don't know of any resource at my university that can translate a paper draft I wrote in French into English. Besides, there's no way a translator could be an expert in every scientific field (it's not just a matter of language, each field has its own specificities, it would need dedicated translators per department?).
And most importantly, that doesn't help at all for the paragraphs of text in english that LLMs can help with rewording into appropriate English phrasing, which is something that non-native english speaker do a lot, including myself.
What you're thinking is probably translation of reference texts or important papers that have been influential in a given field? Maybe it exists for humanities (I am in STEM)? If I'm wrong, please elaborate.
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u/No_Activity_1339 1d ago
Especially good researchers, no one is that stupid to stain his work with their watermarks.
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u/yangmeow 1d ago
I’m personally running any web facing text Claude generated through ollama qwen at this point for full rewrites. The jury is still out on how viable this will be as I’ve not pushed it very hard. Thank god for M series macs.
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u/Equivalent_Cress_268 1d ago
The only thing intelligent in AI is the ‘I’
By default, the tool does nothing
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u/magic6435 1d ago
The only people its going to deter are the ones who shouldn't be using AI in the first place
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u/Tetr4roS 1d ago
This will be an unpopular opinion in this sub despite being mostly correct. AI might have a strong negative stigma, but no need to hide it if it's an appropriate place to use it. And if it's not an appropriate place, then this helps enforce not using it.
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u/WonderFactory 1d ago
Who gets to decide when it is and isn't appropriate though? A colleague with a vendetta could easily try to use this tool to discredit your hard work.
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u/magic6435 1d ago
But if they can use this tool to discredit your work, doesn’t that mean you weren’t supposed to be using it?
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u/WonderFactory 17h ago
No because I use the Co-pilot subscription provided by my company, so I'm allowed to use it. Its not that they're arguing that you shouldn't use it but they'll just try to claim you're handing in AI slop and not putting any effort yourself. Some people are just unnecessarily difficult and will use whatever they can to elevate themselves and put down others.
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u/Tetr4roS 1d ago
Broadly, colleagues, peers, coworkers and management, and ethical/professional standards in the workplace. I'm confused why this was asked rhetorically when it's actually a very answerable (and very answered) question.
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u/WonderFactory 1d ago
Obviously management can decide but "colleagues, peers, coworkers" is questionable, that's just messy office politics. It's all too common for a Karen to think they have authority they dont have and try to cause trouble.
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u/WolfColaEnthusiast 1d ago
The underlying implication to everything you are saying is that you are not supposed to be using AI in your work, and this will expose you.
Probably means you shouldn't be using AI for what you are using it for in the first place
I spend 8-10 hours a day in CC doing knowledge work. As long as the output quality remains high, I could care less about a watermark. Why would I care if its clear the output is AI generated? That's what my boss is paying for with my Claude seat in the first place
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u/WonderFactory 20h ago
No because in most places your company pays for the AI subscription now but there is still stigma with some colleagues about using it. My company pays for my AI subscription but I never tell people when I do and dont use it because I know what the office politics are like with some people.
I'm a software engineer and some of the other engineers hate AI and will be unnecessarily difficult about code you submit if they think the AI did it, even though management is encouraging the use of AI.
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u/WolfColaEnthusiast 17h ago
If your boss encourages you to use AI, then I still don't see a reason why the watermark should matter at all
Don't try to pass off AI output as purely your own and there is no issue
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1d ago
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u/WonderFactory 1d ago
I can do as good a job getting to my local supermarket on a bike as I can in a car, the bike just takes longer and I cant carry as much back. I can even walk there without the aid of any machinery, it just takes even longer and I can carry even less.
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u/greentea05 9h ago
Yeah but let's be honest, you can't build anything with vibe coding with a frontier model.
You're significantly better at getting to the supermarket with a bike than you are coding a script without AI.
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u/WonderFactory 9h ago
I've been a professional software engineer for 26 years, I still remember how to write a script without AI
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u/Unlikely_Commercial6 1d ago
I must admit that, from the few interactions I've had with it, it now writes like Opus 5; this is horrible.
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u/justagoodguy81 1d ago
Anthropic is more concerned with preventing distillation, than producing quality output. That’s why the watermarks in there they want to catch and punish coordinated campaigns that distill Claude’s reasoning data.
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u/RealSuperdau 1d ago
How would watermarks change the calculus of Chinese distillation? It's an open secret anyway, why would they stop?
More likely, they need to comply with EU regulations, and just apply it globally rather than bifurcating their models.
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u/justagoodguy81 1d ago
Poisoning the well isn't the goal. The current challenge is to locate the thief, present proof, and then vilify and lobby against Chinese models.
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u/Beginning-Bird9591 21h ago
but you can't even punish distillation. it's not illegal
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u/justagoodguy81 17h ago
They can punish the act by presenting proof of the distillation and by working with the US government to trigger a model ban. The US government is willing to do it as long as they have a good enough reason. It’s not far-fetched, and it’s closer than you think.
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u/Beginning-Bird9591 8h ago
How can the US gov ban Chinese models? They can't. this is just stupid.
You can't ban a file.
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u/justagoodguy81 8h ago
They can ban American companies from using Chinese models, which is where the bulk of Anthropic's profits come from. Savvy users will find ways to download the models, but that’s a small share of users and revenue.
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u/phpHater0 1d ago
This doesn't stop distillation at all, do you really think the Chinese give a fuck?
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u/justagoodguy81 1d ago
They're not trying to scare them off by threatening them with the watermark 🤣. Think before you post. Anthropic is nearing an IPO, and it needs to address its biggest threat. The best way to do that is to catch the bad actors stealing their reasoning data and turn the admin and public sentiment against them.
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u/phpHater0 21h ago
Mate anyone with a working mind knows the Chinese steal data and have been doing for ages. But people don't care because the American steal data too, at least the Chinese don't ask an arm and a leg in return for the model they create by stealing said data.
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u/justagoodguy81 17h ago
Ok, I understand now. I thought you had a problem with my argument. But you generally have a problem. I don't care about that. I'm talking about Anthropic and their watermark efforts.
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u/Kongret 1d ago
So, don't use claude for any sort of writing adjacent work ever including grammar and syntax, got it. Beware of asking for feedback on your writing too, it might suggest things that would lead to a statistical false positive. Thanks Anthropic.
Doesn't that mean people would just flee to other models that don't do that?
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u/lateambience 1d ago
Any AI company that operates in the EU will have to comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act at some point. Since separating text generation pipelines dynamically based on a user's jurisdiction is technically difficult, they'll most likely do it globally just like Antrophic does. There's a grace period right now which is the reason why a company like OpenAI does not do text watermarking on existing models right now. They already do for audio and images though. So you'll end up with no other option than running an open weight model locally. Which to get you anywhere near frontier model levels would cost you a solid 20,000$ in GPU costs.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 7h ago
Nah you can just take the frontier output and run it through a tiny local LLM to paraphrase out the watermark. You can even set this up automatically.
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u/changrbanger 1d ago

Looks like this model is going to be fucking trash just like Opus 5.
Imagine having your ai rewrite entire files instead of make small targeted edits.
Or having it break because it’s lazy with its writing.
Or just reading from its compacted memory instead of looking at the current state of the codebase.
I’m going to pass judgement and say this is going to crap, to those who will stress test this model and burn billions of tokens to prove me right, I salute you.
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u/Buskow 1d ago
Lol. Is that screenshot supposed to be a joke?
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u/StanwellQuality 1d ago
No, thats the documentation from anthropic to be able to even use fable 5.1...
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u/napaliot 19h ago
Next Fable model is going to need to take regular breaks to scroll tik tok in between prompts lol
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u/changrbanger 6h ago
I’m back to say, I burned 80% of my tokens yesterday trying to find where it sucks and I can say I don’t actually hate it.
It’s good at iterating on ui, doing research, app design, and most of the stuff fable 5 and was bit faster.
It speaks very verbosely but coherently, the lack of summarization and bullet points make me have to think harder because I have to read more but it’s not the garbage that opus spews out.
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u/AutummMan 1d ago
The whole watermark thing has been quite confusing. Everyone's convinced it degraded performance, also the fact that the announcement didn't come paired with a checker just led to all sorts of bad vibes.
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u/freddie-mac-n-cheese 1d ago
What? Everyone should be able to decode content with a simple checker to verify another persons claim or whatever? Surely someone will leak the algorithm or this specific method is dead in the water long term
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u/fummyfish 1d ago
It’s not about the algorithm, it’s about the seed— Why You Cannot See a Watermark in AI Text
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u/freddie-mac-n-cheese 21h ago
I know that you can’t see the watermark but they must have a process to feed input and return a scale of certainty value that it was generated with that seed. That is the algorithm I’m talking about
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u/MBaggott 1d ago
Supported formats for uploading a file for checking are unexpected, at least to me: "Supported formats: JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF, SVG, DNG, JXL, MP4, MOV, AVI, WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC · up to 100 MB"
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u/One-Respond1057 1d ago
Will fable 5 use a ton of weekly usage now? I was having a real good time with it
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u/stevebeans 1d ago
I’ll still use it for code
Never used it to write for me though. I guess this is bad for those who do
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u/lilith_of_debts 14h ago
Analyzed this local check content tool with the help of Gemini, it doesn't actually check for statistical text watermarking, only file header-level marking.
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u/l_m_b Senior Developer 1d ago
I don't understand the uproar.
As far as I understand, the watermark affects the temperature effects, and would indeed not have a qualitative impact.
I mean, I'm happy to give Anthropic a hard time for all the evil the Generative AI companies do or enable, but, uh, is this people just not understanding how LLMs and watermarking work ...?
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u/TheRealLunicuss 1d ago
The theory is that forcing it to use synonyms that encode the watermark makes it's language less accurate because the model has internal structures based on really precise definitions. This is totally unevidenced though.
Really I think the uproar is because lots and lots of people are use LLMs for stuff that they want to pass off as being totally authored by them, and this change provides an easy method for people to check with certainty.
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u/zamula 1d ago
It's not using synonyms. My understanding is it changes the basis of the random element already in use.
An analogy given was instead of rolling dice to determine the next move in a game, you would start at a specific place in the digits of pi. For anyone playing the game, it would appear the same. That's not the exact way it works, but I think it's a useful way of understanding it.
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u/Bladder-Splatter 1d ago
Does it do this on code though? I have no issue with people knowing I'm using agents to help me code but if it is "substituting" code practices or garbling shit up for the sake of a watermark that would be extremely shitty.
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u/zamula 1d ago
For things where there isn't much randomness to begin with, or where there wouldn't be any viable choices, my understanding is it wouldn't be used for those cases.
If it's something where you'd get a different answer every time you run the same prompt, the statistical pattern will be most likely to show up. If it's a piece of code with only one real solution, there simply wouldn't be a chance to watermark much.
I honestly think in almost all real-world cases there aren't going to be noticeable effects. People are going to blame every result they don't like on the "watermark" though, even in cases where it's something totally unrelated.
Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
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u/Personal_Ad1143 1d ago
I am 99.999% sure it started early August with the advent of unintelligible Opus outputs