OpenAI has announced that developers can now opt in to watermarking text generated through its API, as the company extends its existing content provenance efforts to one of the more difficult forms of AI output to reliably identify.

In a blog post published on Monday, the company details a new system dubbed textGrain, which embeds a “statistical signal” into generated text by subtly influencing the words a model chooses — for example, favoring one suitable word over another when either would make sense in a sentence. Over a long enough passage, those choices form a pattern that OpenAI’s detector can identify.

API customers worldwide can enable watermarking on supported models from today, and in the coming weeks, OpenAI says it will begin automatically watermarking eligible text produced by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union (EU). This is in response to new transparency requirements under the EU AI Act.

“Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API,” the company writes. “This lets customers decide how watermarking fits their transparency obligations and the experiences they provide to users.”

“Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API. This lets customers decide how watermarking fits their transparency obligations and the experiences they provide to users.”

It’s worth noting that OpenAI’s approach differs from that Anthropic outlined when it announced text watermarking for Claude in August . Anthropic said it would apply watermarking globally to supported Claude models, explaining that it didn’t yet have a reliable way to limit the technology by region.

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