Ars Technica AI · 10/6/2026, 8:50:32 PM
OpenAI Enables Default Text Watermarking for ChatGPT in EU
To comply with the EU AI Act, OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT outputs will be watermarked by default in the European Union using a proprietary method called 'textGrain,' while remaining opt-in elsewhere. The watermark embeds invisible patterns in word choice distributions to enable machine detection, though technical documentation acknowledges it is easily circumventable by users with basic know-how. Detector access is currently restricted to approved researchers and organizations.
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OpenAI will begin automatically watermarking text generated with ChatGPT in the European Union, the company has announced. It will also offer the watermarking feature in other regions, but it will be off by default outside of the EU.
The move in Europe is driven by a need to comply with the EU AI Act, which took effect in August. It requires marking content produced by AI models in a way that another tool can detect. Unfortunately, there is still no completely effective and reliable way to do that. A few standards already exist, like SynthID and the C2PA project, but they are relatively easy to circumvent for anyone with basic know-how.
The same is likely true for OpenAI's watermark. Its method is proprietary; the company calls it textGrain, and has published a technical paper explaining how it works. But in general, it works like other LLM watermarking tools we've seen in the past: It puts patterns in the word choices that are not clear to a human reader and that don't meaningfully change the general quality of the output, but that someone with a key can use a specialized detector to find. OpenAI says it will be giving access to the detector to a limited number of researchers and organizations and providing a request-for-approval process for others to be added over time.