Trivially bypass text watermarks by requesting a Base64 response

Anthropic plans to release text watermarking based on Google DeepMind's SynthID, which deterministically modulates the pseudorandom number generator behind token selection to allow later detection of AI-written text. However, the watermark is trivially bypassed by requesting the response encoded in Base64 and then decoding it, as the decoded text no longer follows the watermarked distribution. The bypass was highlighted in a Hacker News comment, though no official statement from Anthropic has been made.