Google SynthID Detector Simplifies Watermark Detection and Expands Support to Other AI Providers - infoq.com

The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request. The program, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, will focus on scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence and machine learning and on a technique called “standoff sensing,” which refers to the ability to take physiological readings without attaching a device to a subject’s person. According to details of the budget document, which were first reported by Inside Defense, the project will “modernize federal polygraph and credibility assessment technologies” to improve their accuracy and reliability. But the project may be just the latest in a long line of failed attempts to use technology to detect lies. “It’s a misguided effort to reduce the complex to something that is tangible,” says Kyri Kotsoglou, a legal scholar at Northumbria University in the UK who studies the use of polygraphs in the justice system. The move comes at a time of high tension within the department.

Guillaume Meyer created a viral AI watermark remover. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Guillaume Meyer, a Paris-based tech founder and creator of a viral open-source project "Watermarks Remover," which he made in response to Anthropic's AI watermark announcement. His words have been edited for length and clarity. I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been in the tech industry for over 20 years. Last week, Anthropic announced it would add an invisible AI watermark. I knew other vendors, like Gemini, were already doing this, and out of curiosity, I started researching what AI watermarking is and how it works. I had the idea to build a tool to see if I could remove the invisible watermark. A few hours later, I published the first version of my watermark remover on GitHub. After my second X post about the project on August 11, it blew up, and I got over 2 million impressions. I later discovered that it went viral on LinkedIn and other social networks, too. I had to create new accounts just to learn about what people were saying about it. I was not ready for the attention.

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.