# AI assistance is not authorship > Source: > Published: 2026-08-15 13:17:39+00:00 This is exactly why Anthropic pisses me off. You can keep saying the watermark doesn’t change ownership, doesn’t identify the user, doesn’t affect quality, doesn’t add hidden characters, and won’t look any different to readers. Fine. But that is not the whole issue. The issue is that you are still marking work that a human being may have thought through, structured, argued, and emotionally meant, just because AI helped process it. AI assistance is not authorship. If I wrote the idea, the argument, the meaning, the emotional core, and the final judgment, then it is my work. If Claude helped translate it, polish a sentence, or make it clearer, that does not suddenly make Claude the author. But a watermark absolutely changes how people perceive authorship. People are not going to say, “Claude may have been involved in processing this text.” They are going to say, “AI wrote this.” And honestly, who the hell are you to do that to my writing? Who gave you the right to stamp your model’s involvement onto work that came from my thoughts, my experience, my voice, and my judgment? You can say it does not change ownership all you want, but socially, reputationally, and creatively, it absolutely changes how the work is read. So fine. Do whatever you want. Build your watermarking system. Follow whatever framework you want. I’m not using Claude. Good luck. We’ve written an FAQ to answer some of the questions we've received about watermarking. In summary: • We’re implementing watermarking to comply with the EU AI Act. Other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will also be implementing watermarking;