You might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropic said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked to let consumers know. The change will allow the company to comply with EU regulations governing the transparency of AI use.

The EU’s Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content requires companies that provide and deploy AI systems to inform customers when they are interacting with AI and to include watermarks on AI content. Consumers also must know when they’re exposed to deepfakes and emotion-recognition and biometric-categorization tools.

Watermarking — an authentication process that originated in Italy in the 13th century — is entirely different for AI content. The AI system can automatically embed markers in text indicating that the content originated from AI and not a human. Examples could be different spacing between words and numbers, word sequencing and other invisible signals that remain with the text even if the person copies and pastes it across different platforms. Readers can’t see these markers, but computer systems can.

In its announcement this week, Anthropic said Claude models launched on or after Aug. 2 would include watermarking. That includes content created by Claude through the API, Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Claude Tag. Watermarking will apply to all Claude-generated content wherever the AI system is offered, not just the EU.

Anthropic said it would share details on detecting the watermarks in the future.

A representative for Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and clarification.

What will be watermarked

Claude will include watermarks in text and files — including .svg, .png, or .jpg — that it generates. With text, the watermarks will be signals embedded into letters and words that will be invisible to readers but visible to machine systems. Even if the text is copied and pasted from text editors such as Windows Notepad or MacOS’s TextEdit, the watermarks will remain. The marks also might not be eliminated through human editing, either.

“Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from,” the company said.

Read more: I Used Every AI Cheating App and Detector and Came to One Conclusion

Image files created by Claude will have signed provenance metadata, including information about where the image came from, who created it and if it has been modified. If someone tries to tamper with it — for example, trying to hide that it was generated by AI — the cryptographic signature will break and thus will show the reader that it was tampered with.

AI transparency is a growing trend. Substack partnered with Pangram to let readers know how much, if any, a post was generated by AI. Suno recently announced changes to help listeners know if a song was created by AI. If LinkedIn customers suspect AI slop, they can let LinkedIn know. Spotify’s new feature, AI Persona, allows listeners and creators to know which music was created with AI.

It’s not foolproof

Anthropic included a caveat in its announcement. The presence of watermarking doesn’t necessarily mean the content or image was created by Claude, nor does the absence of watermarking mean Claude wasn’t involved, either.

For example, let’s say someone wants to repurpose an essay from another writer. They punch the essay into Claude and ask the AI to reword it. The output will have watermarking, but the content’s facts and details came from a writer, not AI. People often use Claude for proofreading, translating and summarizing, the company said.

Someone might also take content from Claude and edit it and combine it with other text. Even if only a small portion of the final draft is from Claude, there could be a watermark, perhaps undermining the legitimacy of the document for the reader.

Read more: Students Cheating With AI Caused This Ivy League School to Upend a 133-Year-Old Tradition

Anthropic said content generated or processed by Claude might not have a watermark, for various reasons. It could be that the amount of AI-generated content is too small, or perhaps the content has been “heavily edited, paraphrased, translated or mixed into other writing.”

It’s also possible that a Claude-generated image doesn’t have a watermark either. For example, if someone takes a screenshot of the image and re-saves it as a different file, it won’t have the metadata.

Although Anthropic is trying to comply with EU rules, AI detection has been significantly less than reliable, according to some reports. For example, content from non-native English speakers is often falsely flagged as AI-generated.

Ever since being admittedly fascinated by the Cambridge coffee webcam from the 1990s, I’ve written about VPNs, the NFL, smartphones, living wages, over/unders and everything in between.

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For a while it seemed like the diarrhea-inducing parasite cyclospora was everywhere. Confirmed and suspected cases number more than 22,000 across 15 states, with 517 people requiring hospitalization. Two people in Michigan died. But now, with signs that the outbreak is slowing down, experts say lettuce is probably safe to eat again.

The reason? Most of the contaminated produce is no longer available.

Federal health authorities have linked the outbreak to iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and distributed by Taylor Farms, including at Taco Bell restaurants. On July 17, Taylor Farms announced a recall of shredded iceberg lettuce and salad mixes with “best if used by” dates through August 3, advising consumers to immediately discard any of the affected products. Grocery stores and restaurants are responsible for removing recalled items.

“That product is off the market, so I think there’s absolutely lower risk for cyclospora in terms of eating lettuce,” says Kali Kniel, a professor of microbial food safety at the University of Delaware.

But that doesn’t mean consumers shouldn’t still be vigilant about what they’re eating. As of August 6, there are two additional clusters of cyclosporiasis that officials are investigating. While a source has not been identified, officials in North Carolina say the state is looking into parsley and cilantro. At the same time, an outbreak of salmonella tied to jalapeños has infected at least 345 people across 27 states. On Sunday, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, issued a recall of jalapeños and products containing jalapeños, including salsa and guacamole.

Total cases of cyclosporiasis could continue ticking up for weeks because of the lag time between when a person is exposed and when symptoms emerge, as well as delays related to seeking care, getting tested, and linking cases to contaminated products. On average, people exposed to cyclospora start to feel sick seven days after exposure, but symptoms can take up to 14 days to appear. Given the seven-day average incubation period and the recall in mid-July, most exposures likely happened in June and the first half of July.

Of course, there’s a chance that some people were exposed to the parasite after the recall occurred if they unintentionally ate a contaminated product they had at home. But now that those “best by” dates have passed, the original affected salad products should be long gone from refrigerators.

In Michigan, which was hit hardest by the outbreak, the state has reported more than 12,000 cases since June. Typically, Michigan sees 40 to 50 cases of cyclosporiasis annually. However, new cases have been on a downward trajectory since late July. On August 6, the state’s health department said Michigan residents no longer need to avoid bagged salad mixes and may resume their usual food handling practices as new cyclosporiasis case reports and diarrhea-related emergency department visits are on the decline.

“As we are seeing fewer cases reported than previous weeks and fewer people reporting the onset of new symptoms, we have growing confidence that the outbreak is declining,” Laina Stebbins, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, tells WIRED.

The state health department first identified lettuce and salad greens as a potential source of the outbreak on July 13 and advised consumers to purchase whole heads of lettuce rather than bagged products and to discard outer leaves and thoroughly wash inner leaves before eating. The cyclospora parasite clings to surfaces and crevices of raw produce and is resistant to common food sanitizers, making it tricky to get rid of.

Surging investor demand pushed the chipmaker to upsize the offering by a third.

Intel has raised $20bn in its first share sale since 1971, as the chipmaker moves to fund a major expansion into artificial intelligence manufacturing.

Priced at $95 per share on Monday, the deal was upsized by a third from an initial $15bn after drawing more than $100bn in demand, according to Bloomberg – a sign of how strongly investors continue to back companies in the AI supply chain.

The move is a shift in direction for a company that spent $82bn buying back its own stock in the 2010s. Under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who has prioritised financial discipline since taking over, Intel’s shares are up by around 164pc in 2026 after a torrid few years.

Proceeds will fund Intel’s capital expenditure programme, which the company recently raised to $20bn for 2026, driven by surging demand for central processing units as AI agents proliferate.

Intel is also building out its contract manufacturing business, with the goal of competing with Taiwan’s TSMC, after securing Tesla as a customer for its 14A manufacturing process.

Last month, the company announced a €5bn investment to upgrade and expand its Leixlip campus in Kildare, Ireland and committed to keeping the country at the centre of its manufacturing network.

Since establishing a presence in Ireland in the late 1980s, Intel has invested more than €30bn into its operations here. The Leixlip campus serves as one of the company’s most advanced manufacturing facilities, according to Intel, which currently employs around 4,900 people in Ireland.

The share sale is part of a run of large equity raises linked to AI spending. Alphabet is raising up to $85bn across several instruments, while Oracle has a $20bn at-the-market sale underway. Intel’s offering was led by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Finding a mobile plan used to be simple. Today, it’s easy to be drawn in by a low advertised monthly price, only to discover additional costs once it’s time to check out. Activation fees, taxes, device payments, and fluctuating monthly bills can quickly turn what looked like a bargain into a much more expensive commitment.

That shift in consumer expectations has changed how people shop for wireless services. Instead of chasing the lowest number on a billboard, more customers are looking for something equally important: transparency. They want to know exactly what they’ll pay each month, what they’re getting in return, and whether they’ll have to compromise on network quality to save money.

This is where Metro by T-Mobile is trying to stand apart. Rather than focusing solely on discounts, the carrier is emphasizing straightforward pricing, flexible plans, and access to the strength of T-Mobile’s network, giving customers value that extends beyond the monthly bill.

The True Cost of a Wireless Plan

For many consumers, the advertised monthly price is only one part of the equation. Hidden fees and unexpected charges can significantly increase the actual cost of ownership over time.

Whether it’s activation fees, taxes that appear only at checkout, or promotional pricing that changes after a few months, these surprises can make it difficult to budget accurately. That’s especially frustrating for customers who simply want dependable wireless service without constantly reviewing their monthly statements.

Metro by T-Mobile takes a different approach by putting key details upfront. The carrier highlights offers with taxes and fees already included, no activation fees on eligible promotions, and pricing designed to remain predictable. That means customers know what they’re signing up for before making the switch, helping remove much of the uncertainty traditionally associated with changing carriers.

Reliable Connectivity Matters Just as Much as Price

Affordability is important, but it means little if the network can’t keep up with everyday life. Streaming videos, joining video calls, navigating unfamiliar cities, or simply staying connected with family all depend on consistent network performance.

That’s why Metro by T-Mobile places significant emphasis on the network behind its plans. The carrier runs on T-Mobile, America’s Best Network*, helping address one of the biggest concerns shoppers often have when considering prepaid wireless service. Instead of asking customers to choose between affordability and dependable connectivity, Metro by T-Mobile aims to offer both.

For many consumers, that combination changes the conversation. Choosing a prepaid carrier no longer has to mean sacrificing the experience they expect from a national wireless network.

*Based on analysis by Ookla® of Speedtest Intelligence® 1H 2026 data. Metro may be slower than T-Mobile during congestion. Get full terms.

A Free Samsung Galaxy A37 5G Makes Switching Even Easier

For shoppers planning to upgrade their smartphone, Metro by T-Mobile is pairing its transparent pricing with an attractive device offer.

Eligible customers who bring their number and join Metro with a qualifying $40 plan can get the Samsung Galaxy A37 5G at no cost. The promotion is positioned as putting more than $450+ in value back into customers’ pockets while also including taxes and fees in the monthly price and eliminating activation fees. Since the service runs on T-Mobile’s network, customers also benefit from nationwide connectivity alongside the savings.

For someone already considering a new Android smartphone, this combination helps reduce one of the biggest expenses associated with switching carriers – the upfront cost of a new device.

Love Your Current Phone? Keep It.

Not everyone wants a brand-new smartphone. Many users are perfectly happy with the device already in their pocket and simply want a better wireless plan.

Metro by T-Mobile addresses that need through its Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) option. Customers can keep their existing compatible phone while signing up for one line of Unlimited 5G service for just $25 per month online. The plan also includes taxes and fees, comes with no activation fees, and is backed by a five-year price guarantee, * making it easier to know what to expect month after month.

*5-Yr Guarantee covers on-network talk, text & data.

The flexibility is important. Instead of encouraging customers to replace a phone that still works perfectly well, Metro by T-Mobile allows them to reduce their monthly wireless costs while continuing to use a device they’re already comfortable with.

Apple Users Have an Option Too

The savings aren’t limited to Android users. Customers who prefer Apple’s ecosystem can also take advantage of Metro by T-Mobile’s iPhone promotion. Eligible customers who bring their number and ID while signing up for the $50 AutoPay plan can receive the iPhone 16e at no cost. The promotion also includes a $100 virtual prepaid card after the third month and no activation fees, making it another example of Metro by T-Mobile pairing device savings with straightforward pricing.

By offering both Android and iPhone promotions, Metro by T-Mobile gives customers the flexibility to choose the smartphone ecosystem they already prefer rather than asking them to compromise.

More Than a Promotional Price

While attractive device offers certainly grab attention, Metro by T-Mobile’s broader message is about long-term value.

Many wireless shoppers are increasingly looking beyond introductory discounts. They want predictable monthly bills, fewer unexpected charges, and confidence that their service will continue performing when they need it most.

By combining transparent pricing with the reach of T-Mobile’s network, Metro by T-Mobile positions itself as an option that focuses on the complete ownership experience instead of simply advertising the lowest possible monthly rate. The emphasis on no activation fees, taxes and fees included on qualifying plans, and long-term pricing certainty helps reinforce that approach.

The Bottom Line

Shopping for a wireless plan today is about much more than finding the lowest monthly price. Consumers increasingly want clarity, flexibility, reliable coverage, and offers that genuinely reduce the total cost of switching.

Metro by T-Mobile brings those elements together through transparent pricing, meaningful device promotions, and access to T-Mobile’s network. Whether someone is looking for a free Samsung Galaxy A37 5G, wants to keep their current phone with an affordable Unlimited 5G plan, or is interested in switching to an iPhone 16e, the carrier offers multiple paths to savings without losing sight of what matters most – knowing what you’ll pay and staying connected on a network backed by T-Mobile.

It wouldn’t be a PlayStation exclusive without some matching hardware, right?

It’s an approach we’ve seen the gaming giant take before, and personally, I’ve always had a soft spot for the various Spider-Man-themed PS5 editions. Those consoles understood that a limited-edition PlayStation doesn’t necessarily need to reinvent the hardware itself. Rather, the right colors and a design that makes the console feel like part of the game.

Nearform CEO Ciaran Cosgrave looks at the advantages of AI-native teams over traditional pyramid-shaped structures in software engineering.

Two engineers. Six months. A billion-dollar product. That’s what it took Anthropic to build Claude Code from concept to company-wide infrastructure. Not a prototype, or a niche internal tool, but something that, by early 2026, had become mission-critical across the entire organisation.

Claude Code was developed using AI agents to accelerate iteration, enabling a pace of 60 to 100 internal releases per day, with each engineer pushing far beyond typical industry output. By January 2026, nearly all of Anthropic’s code was being written with Claude Code itself. Now this isn’t just about faster development, as Claude Code has become a fundamental model that has been engineered to allow small teams to compress what used to take years into just months.

Welcome to the AI-native engineering team. It looks nothing like what most organisations are building.

The autopsy of the traditional delivery model

The traditional tech consultancy team model was built on a simple idea that more people equals more output, and offshore centres made it possible to grow capacity quickly and cheaply. Junior-heavy teams drove margins, while senior engineers provided oversight and direction. This pyramid-shaped team model grew tall and strong.

But as these large, distributed teams grew, so did the complexity of coordinating them. ‘Agile’ emerged as a response to that friction and it was a genuine improvement on what came before. Sequential waterfall processes inherited from manufacturing and defence in the 1970s were catastrophically misaligned with the realities of software, and agile stepped in with an answer to shorten cycles, embrace iteration and treat working software as the primary measure of progress.

But while it still has its place, agile is designed for a world where humans write every line of code, where in some situations it can carry compromises that have somewhat normalised.

The sprint review feedback problem is the most obvious one. Agile promised tight feedback loops to ensure teams build the right thing, but what can actually happen is that the feedback arrives after two weeks of building. The demo reveals misalignment. Course-correcting mid-sprint is politically difficult and the rework in the next sprint is demoralising. The two-week cycle that was originally designed as a discipline quickly became a ceiling.

And underneath all of it, a structural failure that AI has now made impossible to ignore: most enterprise agile implementations aren’t always agile. The team iterates inside a waterfall container. Budget cycles, governance gates, fixed-scope contracts – the organisation behaves with all the rigidity of sequential planning while carrying the overhead of agile processes. It’s an expensive failure mode because it produces neither the benefits of agile nor the predictability of waterfall – just the cost of both.

And this is where the model starts to break. Coding is only a fraction of end-to-end software delivery, but AI-native systems are radically compressing the human labour required to execute it. The tactical execution, testing, documentation, debugging and scaffolding is increasingly automated (not to mention how we can use AI to help in requirements, prototyping etc).

When 60pc to 80pc of routine engineering effort can be eliminated, headcount scale stops being an advantage. The real bottleneck shifts entirely from the mechanics of writing code to the architecture of system complexity and business intent. Essentially, scale soon stops being an advantage and starts looking like inefficiency.

Large teams introduce coordination overhead. Decision-making slows. Context is lost across layers. What was once a strength – headcount – becomes a drag on delivery. Your pyramid won’t collapse overnight, but it will start to hollow out.

The scarce resource has changed

In 2025, AI systems crossed a remarkable benchmark. SWE-bench Verified, an engineering benchmark for AI models, saw top scores jump from around 60pc in 2024 to nearly 100pc in 2025. In controlled conditions, AI models can now resolve almost any defined software engineering problem.

According to a survey of more than 24,000 developers globally, 85pc now regularly use AI tools for coding and software design. GitHub Copilot crossed 20m users in mid-2025, with paid subscribers growing 75pc year-over-year.

When code generation is abundant and cheap, the scarcity shifts. The new scarce resource is judgement (and finite budget for tokens). The ability to translate a messy, contested business problem into a precise technical specification that an AI can execute reliably becomes much more vital. Security intuition, architectural foresight and the human capacity to know what not to build are all commodities fresh in demand.

By the end of 2026, 75pc of developers will orchestrate rather than code. This is not a distant forecast. It’s already the operating reality for the highest-performing teams.

The engineers who thrive in this environment aren’t trying to out-code AI, but they’re the ones who understand that their primary value is now deciding what to build, doing upfront thinking about the code objectives and specifications, and verifying it was built correctly – not producing the line-by-line code themselves.

What does AI-native truly look like?

An AI-native engineering team reflects this shift in how it is structured and how it operates as it assumes that AI handles execution, while humans handle judgement.

In practice, this leads to smaller, more senior teams. Where a previous delivery model might require eight to 12 engineers, with a handful of junior engineers sprinkled throughout, AI-native teams trend towards three to five experienced engineers augmented by AI systems. The shape of the team changes because the nature of the work has changed.

Roles evolve accordingly. Senior engineers spend less time writing boilerplate and more time defining system constraints, making architectural decisions and reviewing AI-generated output. QA shifts from manually writing test cases to designing strategies that account for AI-generated code patterns, and product managers increasingly prototype directly with AI, collapsing the gap between specification and implementation.

AI may now generate a significant proportion of production code, but in high-performing teams every line still passes through human review. The core engineering skill is no longer generation. It’s validation – getting to know the core processes that will be utilising AI, and making sure it is truly solving the problems and not adding an extra layer of stress.

Even the way performance is measured begins to shift. Traditional metrics such as tickets closed or lines of code written become less meaningful when output can be generated at scale and activity is no longer a proxy for merit, and engineering observability must pivot from tracking developer activity to measuring the cycle time of business value or system stability.

Even newer signals, like token usage, can become traps, rewarding volume over value and encouraging inefficient, costly behaviours at scale. The critical question becomes: how quickly can a team verify that what has been produced is actually accurate, ethical and valuable?

Shipping the future

None of this suggests large teams will vanish overnight. But the structure of opportunity is changing. Junior roles will evolve towards higher-order problem-solving and AI collaboration, and senior engineers will become even more critical as orchestrators of complex human-AI systems. And consultancies will need to move away from labour-heavy models towards outcome-driven delivery.

Businesses should be asking if they’ve redesigned how they deliver software, or just made the old model slightly faster, because ‘slightly faster’ is not the destination. The teams that will define the next decade of software delivery are building something structurally different: smaller, more senior, more focused on judgement than execution, operating with AI agents as genuine team members rather than productivity accessories. And this requires a careful look at not only the technology and tools utilised, but also the human considerations – like training and incentive-setting – and process design.

The two-engineer Claude Code isn’t an anomaly to admire from a distance. It’s a template. The organisations that treat it as such and redesign accordingly will ship the future. The ones that don’t will find themselves outpaced by teams a fraction of their size, wondering when things changed.

By Ciaran Cosgrave

Ciaran Cosgrave is the CEO of Nearform. He works in business and IT strategy, innovation, and company culture, specialising in mobile, cloud, business transformation, innovation and strategy.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

• Pentagon backs $820 million expansion of domestic drone component manufacturing capacity
• PDW plans to expand its Huntsville facility for military drone production
• Funding will increase production of propulsion, power, and vision systems

The Pentagon has conditionally committed up to $820 million to Performance Drone Works (PDW) for expanding domestic UAS component manufacturing capacity.

The financing is meant to expand domestic manufacturing of critical unmanned aerial system components across several distinct product and technology categories.

Hackers associated with the Russian threat group Sandworm have been targeting system administrators and IT professionals through fake job offers since at least May.

A report from the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) details a social engineering campaign attributed to UAC-0145, which is believed to be a sub-cluster of Sandworm (APT44). In the campaign, the threat actor targets victims while posing as IT companies and recruiters.

The agency says that the attacker studies the targets’ resumes uploaded on job sites and then initiates direct contact.

Conversations are then moved to Telegram to arrange a video interview over Zoom. During the interview, which is conducted in English, the candidates receive mock technical assignments that require them to connect to a corporate VPN.

In one case that CERT-UA observed, the attacker impersonated the international IT firm Sopra Steria using seemingly legitimate email addresses similar to the company’s office in Bulgaria.

“In parallel, additional instructions for the technical interview are sent via email, including configuration files for connecting to a ‘corporate’ VPN using Wireguard (Linux/Windows) to supposedly perform test tasks,” CERT-UA says.

The downloaded file is configured to produce a fake error. The attackers then prompt the victim to download a modified WireGuard-based client called “SopraVPN” from SourceForge.

The SourceForge page even includes a link to soprasteria-bg[.]com to increase credibility, although the domain has no connection to the legitimate company.

The trojanized client supports a malicious, nonstandard “SymmetricKey” configuration option that decrypts and executes embedded PowerShell code.

On Windows, the malicious command creates a scheduled task and downloads an additional payload from the Internet.

On Linux, it uses cURL to retrieve another executable from attacker-controlled infrastructure through the VPN.

CERT-UA also noted that WireGuard’s standard Base64 decoding was replaced in the trojanized version with a custom, dynamically generated Base64 alphabet, which renders key strings unreadable with standard decoders and protects the PowerShell code from analysis.

The Ukrainian cyber agency advises telecommunications providers and IT companies whose staff are targeted by this campaign to restrict corporate resource access to managed, continuously monitored devices protected by EDR, including when employees use personal equipment.

APT44 is notorious for targeting critical infrastructure and government entities both in Ukraine, and also in other countries.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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