Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic.
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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 cancelingArturo 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.
