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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Claude's watermark covers models launched from 2 August — Anthropic has not launched one since
On 11 August Anthropic published how watermarking works in Claude: the model embeds an imperceptible pattern in generated text by biasing what the company calls "low-stakes choices" between equally good words. The mark survives copying and pasting, is invisible to a reader and is meant to satisfy Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which became enforceable for newly launched systems on 2 August 2026. Anthropic applies it worldwide, saying it has no durable way to scope the behaviour by region. The scope is narrower than the coverage suggests. Anthropic's own wording is that "Claude models launched on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch", and that the EU law grants a transition period for models launched before that date, to which the company is "working to add" watermarking over the coming months. No completion date is given. Against our catalogue that rule currently applies to nothing. We hold twenty Claude profiles, twelve of them still in service. The most recent release is Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026 — nine days before the cutoff. Claude Sonnet 5 arrived on 30 June, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on 9 June, Opus 4.8 on 28 May. Every model a customer can call today therefore falls on the transition side of the line, including the ones running on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry, where Anthropic notes coverage may be further limited. Anthropic is unusually plain about what the mark does not do. Detection "doesn't work well on small samples", the signal is sparser in factual passages where fewer word choices are available without hurting accuracy, and code carries less watermarking than prose. If Claude only edits or proofreads a human text, the mark may be undetectable; a complete rewrite of every word removes it. The company also stresses that finding a watermark proves the text passed through Claude, not that Claude wrote it. Images and files are handled separately, through C2PA content credentials in file metadata, which a screenshot or a format conversion strips. The detection tool that would let anyone check a passage is not out yet either — Anthropic says an API is coming, with technical documentation to follow. For readers the practical reading is this: from today's models, an unmarked Claude answer is the normal case, not evidence of tampering. That will only change when the first post-cutoff model ships, or when the retrofit reaches the current family.
Claude Opus 5 →From 2 August a chatbot in the EU must say it is not a person — and the Commission can now fine
The European Commission announced on 31 July 2026 that from 2 August its AI Office, together with national authorities, begins enforcing the AI Act's transparency rules. The date matters more than the rules themselves: the obligations have been on the books since the regulation entered into force, but until now nobody was collecting on them. What applies from 2 August comes from Article 50 of the regulation. Chatbots, agents and avatars must make clear that the user is dealing with a machine and not a person. Deepfakes and other generated or manipulated content must be visibly labelled and additionally carry a machine-readable marker, so that detection does not depend on a human noticing. The same article covers emotion recognition, biometric categorisation and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest without human review. The Commission has issued guidelines, a code of practice and a set of harmonised icons for labelling AI content, and published a first list of more than 180 organisations that have signed the code of practice on transparency of AI-generated content. The penalties are the part that changes behaviour. Breaches can cost up to 15 million euro or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher; for EU institutions the ceiling is 750,000 euro, and the regulation requires proportionality for small businesses and small mid-caps. Supervision falls to national market surveillance authorities, the AI Office and the European Data Protection Supervisor. One more date is worth writing down now. Under Article 111(3) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, providers of general-purpose AI models placed on the market before 2 August 2025 have until 2 August 2027 to bring them into compliance — a full extra year for the generation of models that was already shipping when the rules landed. Several of the models in this catalogue fall into that window.