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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I think the goal is not to validate if you used Claude, the goal is to insert enough information in your code to identify who you are over at Anthropic, like a covert unique hash to identify you, hidden in plain sight, but that's my own speculation and not based on anything.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any other use case... What other reason is there to fingerprint your code?

I assume if they arrest you for vibe coding something that violated computing laws (hacking) they can then scan your code, send it to anthropic, anthropic confirms that Claude was used on your account, on x device to build malware.

Remember they busted a hacker because of his Windows unique install ID.

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> I'm having a hard time thinking of any other use case... What other reason is there to fingerprint your code?

I don't have an answer either way, but I'm taking this occasion to remind you (and HN generally) that many people use LLMs for things other than code

The purpose be to claim in court, ownership and/or rights over said works of an individual who has used AI to assist in the production of the output. Even if the actual idea or concept comes from a person, if the AI inserts watermarking into text, the legal fuel is the watermarking of text, which can then be used in court to fight for rights, where otherwise there would not even be any debate.

Imagine a patent drafted by AI under human direction. Regardless of the current laws, this would provide evidence for, and leave the door open for future laws/claims...

The law in the US allows copyright with "substantial editing" but the watermark system isn't specific enough to highlight individual words or sentences.

Claims would literally be on the balance of probabilities, and there would be argument about exactly where the line is, given that some passages could be heavily edited while some might not be edited at all, and does that mean only parts of the work can be copyrighted?

Other countries allow copyright for AI gen work, so there's no issue there.

The other problem everyone is overlooking, it seems the EU is having Anthropic do this, so the EU's purpose is to identify things made with AI, I guess that includes code, but Anthropic is taking a stance to go even further, even though Claude already attributes itself to your code if it checks it in.

Bingo. There is an assumption that there is a single red/green list of tokens that the provider will allow people to use to verify if something is AI.

In reality, there can be billions of red/green lists. It is trivial to test a piece of text against all of them to see if it was generated using any of the keys that made a particular red/green list. And, as you alluded to, there are enough combinations that each individual account could be assigned its own red/green list so not only would a person be able to tell if the output was AI generated, they would also be able to tell who generated it.

I believe many are missing the point as to the effectiveness of this watermark. It will be exceedingly difficult to get rid of it. Probably impossible. If normal human text uses, more or less, a 50-50 ratio of red and green tokens, and the AI generates your text with 80% red and 20% green, all the rewriting in the world is not going to get the result close enough to the human like 50-50 to avoid a statistical aberration that will be discernible.

I dunno, maybe they want to be able to identify slop and exclude it from training sets?

That doesn't explain why the EU wants it though?

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