Microsoft AI watermarks in Paint and Photos are linked to user IDs, researcher finds

ai and ml Freeeedom! Copyright (c) 2026 New Africa/Shutterstock. No use without permission. Privacy? Not if you use hosted AI services When Anthropic disclosed earlier this month that it would be applying a statistical word-choice watermark to its Claude text output, the company noted that at least 190 AI providers have agreed to abide by Europe's AI transparency rules.One such company is Microsoft, which has been applying its own form of watermarking to images created with the assistance of AI in its Paint and Photos applications for Windows.The EU's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content requires that signatories mark content created with the help of AI in a machine-readable format and that associated metadata indicates at least whether content has been manipulated by A