New Delhi, Aug. 29 -- These days, I notice that my Instagram feed has become flooded with reels on how to get around a watermark on content that has involved AI in some way. Anthropic has deployed this invisible watermark as part of complying with emerging transparency requirements, including the EU AI Act, and has extended the feature across its platforms.

And that has users quite infuriated.

Watermarks are not new. Google has used its own SynthID, an invisible digital watermarking technology developed by DeepMind. It embeds imperceptible markers directly into the pixels of images and videos, the frequencies of audio, or the token-generation patterns of text created by AI models like Gemini. This was rolled out over 2023 and 2024.

The...