OpenAI announced that in response to EU regulations, content traceability will expand from images and audio to text, while acknowledging significant limitations in existing text watermarking technology. Tools already exist for verifying whether images and audio were generated by its models. Text will be added to help determine if content may have been generated or edited by OpenAI models.

The EU's Artificial Intelligence Act requires generative providers to identify generated text in a machine-readable format. The transparency rules took effect on August 2. In the coming weeks, eligible ChatGPT and Codex text within the EU will be watermarked invisibly, covering all packages. The company clarified that text watermarking will not be set as a global default at launch.

The API is globally available from today, limited to certain models, and is turned off by default. Customers will decide whether to use it to meet transparency obligations. Applications for detectors have been opened, initially available only to approved researchers and professional institutions for evaluation and improvement. Public verification tools for images and audio and content traceability interfaces remain open to institutions, unaffected by this text limitation.

The watermark is not a visible mark. The method, called textGrain, leaves an invisible pattern detectable by detectors through subtle word modifications. The signal remains even after the text is copied and pasted. The company stated that the watermark does not identify users, and there is no significant change in model performance when activated. The technical report was co-authored with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. The company also claimed that textGrain meets or exceeds Google DeepMind's SynthID text solution. Anthropic also implemented text identification under the same act in August.

The regional launch is described as a means to collect genuine usage feedback. EU users will encounter it by default, while ChatGPT and Codex in other regions will not. API customers, even outside the EU, can choose to activate it voluntarily.

This is a compliance switch, not a new model. Buyers are the EU regulatory subjects requiring machine-readable identification and voluntarily activating API customers, while the seller is OpenAI embedding signals in the wording. The event is driven by the transparency rules that took effect on August 2. Funding will not shift due to the watermark, and detection rights will initially remain with approved institutions. Beneficiaries are the EU deployers needing to meet obligations, while users relying on copy-pasting to erase sources, with signals still embedded in word order, are under pressure.

Source: Public Information