Anthropic’s move to watermark Claude-generated text is driving some users away from its AI assistant.
The AI lab said this week that some versions of Claude will embed an “imperceptible watermark” directly into their text output. It will travel with the content when it is copied and pasted and may survive some editing, Anthropic said, helping to distinguish AI-generated material from human writing.
Anthropic said watermarking does not change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. Despite that, dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark.
Business Insider spoke with four users who said they had canceled their Claude subscriptions. Some users, who shared confirmation of their cancellations with us, said they disliked the prospect of a persistent marker in their work and were worried about their AI use showing up in client work, such as coding.
While it’s too early to say what the impact could be for Anthropic — the company had 300,000 business customers as of September 2025, a number widely expected to have grown significantly since then — backlash to the watermark shows no sign of slowing.
Anthropic told Business Insider that it hasn’t seen a trend of an uptick in cancellations since it announced the watermark.
Why users say they’re canceling
Arturo Villarroya, who works in public policy, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription — a service that starts at $100 a month — on Wednesday after becoming “uncomfortable” with Anthropic’s new watermarking plan. It has been applied globally to text from supported Claude models since August 2.
“I do use it for everything, mostly coding apps and tools,” he said of Claude, adding that he also used it as a support tool for sourcing, research, and corrections at work.
Villarroya said he’s worried a watermark could remain even when the underlying writing was original and Claude was used only to translate, check spelling, fix academic citations, or lightly summarize a passage.
He said its presence could create problems in academic and professional settings with strict rules on AI use. He added that he is switching to Cursor and Grok 4.6 for coding, and Grok Bot for work and personal organization.
Anthropic said in its blog that a detected watermark indicates Claude processed text, not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content.
That distinction did not ease concerns for some. Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason.
He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties.
He added that the watermark was a “signal to look at Chinese AI providers and learn to work with other models.”
‘They add the watermark anyway’
Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision.
He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits.
“Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway,” Echols said.
Anthropic said in its blog that a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it, and that the mark can remain after Claude has proofread, translated, or summarized content.
Stevan Bogosavljević, a senior software engineer in Montenegro, canceled his Claude Max subscription in July, citing what he views as declining service quality, limited access to Anthropic’s top models, and stronger alternatives. He said the watermark further validated his decision to cancel.
Having code attributed to Claude “definitely would be not desirable,” he said, as he would not want professionally shipped code to carry an invisible marker that could raise questions about authorship, compliance, or client policies.
The case for AI watermarks
Not everyone is against the use of AI watermarks, with some saying they improve transparency as more online content is generated by artificial intelligence. Others have said they could help prevent AI systems from being trained on a growing volume of AI-generated material, which can cause systems to degrade.
Aadit Sheth, cofounder of executive communications firm The Narrative Company, said on X on Tuesday that audiences should be able to tell whether the words they read reflect a person’s own thinking and that watermarks are one way to ensure that.
Anthropic isn’t the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X also adds a “Made with AI” tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. The tag appeared on the resignation post of outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday, but later disappeared.
Anthropic said that it added the watermark in order to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, and that it plans to roll out a free application programming interface, or API, that will allow users and third parties to check text for Claude’s watermark themselves.
Santiago Alessandro Rivera Martínez, a software engineer and founder of the digital agency Directa, said Anthropic’s watermark reinforced his concerns of becoming too dependent on Claude. He said that had led him to cancel his subscription this week.
“When your workflow is built entirely around proprietary software, the provider can change the rules, features, restrictions, or conditions around that workflow later,” he said.
“I would rather have the AI layer of my work be portable and provider-agnostic,” he added.
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