“I don’t feel any shame at all recruiting an army of AI agents to help me accomplish my goals. But I think society is trying to make me feel shame.” — Keith Teare
Welcome to the summer of America’s luddite discontent. Not only are left and right calling for an AI ban, but tech loathing has even infiltrated Silicon Valley in the form of Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output. That, at least, is the view of That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, who believes that watermarking is “nuts.”
In our luddite zeitgeist, Keith believes that a watermark is a scarlet stamp of implied guilt. By marking its own product, Anthropic is not only furnishing the luddite mob with a convenient surveillance tool, but also acknowledging a tacit guilt about using Claude.
“You should never adjust to the market,” the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur explains. “The market’s wrong nine times out of ten.”
As for Dario Amodei, Claude’s dad (so to speak), Keith is even more accusatory. The Anthropic CEO is kissing ass “like a politician, not the leader of a company,” Keith hisses, repeating this week’s whispers that Anthropic is becoming an “ideologically motivated cult.” If Dario were female, Keith would probably make him a witch. Or, at least, a hussy — the hysterical implication, if not the word, of the Journal’s profile of Cami Clark, Dario’s wife.
I took Anthropic’s side — somebody had to. I see watermarking as just another AI tool. It’s an honest human fingerprint in an age of fakery. Live by the algorithm, die by it too. Anyway, a watermark has its uses. Rather than moral opprobrium, it feeds our curiosity about who is and isn’t using AI. So, for example, I ran Keith’s editorial through another AI detector and it indicated 86 percent AI-generated while mine came back as 100 percent human. And if I can elude the scarlet stamp, then even I might have to join the luddite mob.
Five Takeaways
• “Watermarking Is Nuts.” Keith’s editorial takes aim at Anthropic’s decision to watermark Claude’s output — invisible text signals identifying the machine’s hand, cousin to what Google has long done with audio. His objection isn’t the mark itself (“I don’t care that it’s watermarked. I care that Anthropic thinks it should be watermarked”): a watermark starts from suspicion, implies a problem where none exists, and tells Anthropic’s own customers their use of the product needs flagging. Restream doesn’t watermark this show; Adobe doesn’t watermark its exports. To Keith it’s pure zeitgeist capitulation — and while one Claude Max subscriber in the newsletter canceled in protest, Keith hasn’t. Andrew’s rebuttal: watermarking serves curiosity, and in an age of fakery an honest fingerprint is a very human addition.
• The Scarlet Watermark: On AI Shame. The deeper argument was theological. Keith — an atheist who concedes atheism is also a faith, and who believes in good and bad but not sin — feels no shame “recruiting an army of AI agents” so long as he can stand by the output; shame belongs to spam factories and fakers who publish unread. But society, he says, is trying to make him feel it: the canceled author who lost his agent last week proves there’s an issue. Andrew, playing therapist, diagnosed a flicker of guilt anyway — and argued shame is precisely the point: one of the last all-too-human spaces, worth preserving in an age of machines. Both then confessed their methods on air: Pangram scored Keith’s editorial 86 percent AI and Andrew’s 100 percent human. “I’m a clever cheater. You’re a less clever cheater.” Keith: “There’s no shame in that.”
• Keith vs Dario. Keith’s indictment of Anthropic’s CEO was the week’s harshest: Dario Amodei “kisses ass… like a politician, not the leader of a company,” keeps taking the media’s bait, and is “damaging his chances over and over again” in a $2 trillion IPO year — cult whispers included. The right posture, per Keith: never adjust to the market (“wrong nine times out of ten”); do what Elon would do and call bullshit. Andrew’s defense: he’s a fan of Dario, certainly next to Elon and Slippery Sam — and if America really is a nation of Luddites, adjusting is what reality requires. His actual grievance is more prosaic: $100 a month and he’s out of credits, as both Anthropic and OpenAI squeeze revenue for the IPO race. Keith, meanwhile, spent the week testing Grok Bot — a “far better” OpenClaw replacement at $200 a month — and declared himself, this week at least, a Grok Bot guy: “I’m for sale, actually.”
• The Luddite Summer Reading List. The Wall Street Journal declared this the summer America became a nation of Luddites — left and right, with a January 6 organizer now rallying conservatives against AI. Noah Smith diagnosed the poverty of anti-tech thought: tech’s power is persuasion, not coercion, and the iPhone won its argument on day one (Andrew dissents — society never got to discuss the iPhone’s impact). Martin Wolf, reviewing Daron Acemoglu’s new defense of liberal democracy, concluded the ship has sailed: liberal democracy was unthinkable without industrial capitalism, and that age is vanishing. Keith’s gloss is optimistic — the eroding factory life frees individuals for self-realization. Andrew’s snapshot from deindustrialized Indianapolis, and Britain’s twenty percent on disability, says otherwise. Keith’s concession, extracted twice for the record: “You’re right.”
• Unicorns, Circles — and Two IPOs. Keith listened to Andrew’s Renée Jones interview and rated it good — but says she misses the why: overnight global distribution to five billion phones, freemium economics, and rational revenue multiples made unicorns inevitable; to stop them “she’d have to deglobalize the world.” (Andrew’s verdict: “a nicer, smarter version of Lina Khan.” Keith’s question for Democrats: where is your argument for embracing AI?) The New York Times’ circularity warning — tech giants’ profits propped by their own AI investments — got the Grok Bot treatment: hundreds of billions in external revenue make it a Channel Tunnel, not a closed loop, though Andrew noted Keith told the bot the answer first. Illiquid shares carry provisional, not realized, value. And the ending both agreed on: the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are this narrative’s climax. Keith will personally buy both.
About the Co-Host
Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech.
References:
• That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “Why Watermark?”
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