Anthropic now watermarks every Claude text output worldwide, at the model level.

The help-center doc confirms models launching on or after August 2, 2026 weave an imperceptible watermark into generated text plus C2PA-signed provenance metadata on image files. Model-level means it's present across the API, Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry, worldwide rather than EU-only. Anthropic is candid about the limits: it survives proofreading and translation, doesn't prove Claude wrote something, and heavy editing or format conversion can strip it. r/ClaudeAI split three ways in 24 hours: 2,475 upvotes thanking the EU, 209 comments calling it unethical at a 4:1 comment-to-upvote ratio, and 114 comments trying to reverse-engineer the mechanism since no technical documentation was published.