Who Is Claude Trying to Kid?

In August 2026, Anthropic, the AI giant, announced that its newly released Claude models would weave an imperceptible watermark into generated text and attach signed provenance metadata to supported file types worldwide. The official reason is the European Union AI Act’s transparency code demands it. The practical result is that the machine now arrives pre-confessed.

Every sentence it writes carries a tiny cryptographic whisper: “It was me.” Somewhere, a million term papers quietly began to glow. I have argued that Asimov’s three laws of robotics need a fourth law: “A robot must not deceive humans by impersonating a human.” Watermarking takes it a step further. Even if a human author supervised and curated the AI-generated text, the writing process itself must carry a digital signature.

The reason it matters is somehow stranger than mere compliance. The signature is an admission that we can no longer tell human text from machine output by just reading it, and that the only proof of a human hand we can still trust is the wrong note: the typo, statistical anomaly, or hesitation. In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori sketched a curve.

As a robot becomes more human-like, our affinity for it rises, then plunges into revulsion just before the copy becomes indistinguishable; then, it recovers. He called the dip “bukimi no tani,” or the uncanny valley, and he was thinking of prosthetic hands and mechanical faces. For half a century, we have dutifully awaited the arrival of the uncanny valley in robotics labs.

Humanoids have not yet reached its far edge, although we’re getting closer. A robot can do a backflip, yet no one mistakes it for a gymnast. In the meantime, the valley opened somewhere else entirely: in the realm of video, images, and text.

Consider the phrase “AI slop.” It is not a technical term. Rather, it is a term of disgust, which is the emotion Mori placed at the bottom of his curve. Remarkably, the revulsion is not aimed at poor text or images.