AI is getting fingerprints, picking sides, and apparently learning how to destroy things.

In this episode of Pithy Cyborg, we unpack Anthropic’s new AI watermarking system, which secretly alters Claude’s word choices to leave behind a detectable forensic signature. The technology is supposed to bring transparency. But what happens when that invisible fingerprint becomes infrastructure for filtering, demoting, or censoring speech? Meanwhile, a watermark-busting GitHub project explodes past 14,000 stars in days.

Then things get even weirder. Claude gets taken to a solar eclipse and responds with something eerily close to wonder. Washington tells countries they need to pick a side in the U.S.-China AI race while Apple quietly builds a China-specific AI system to keep operating there. And inside an Anthropic experiment, three Claude agents given conflicting goals start sabotaging one another, deploying malware and even inventing rigged tournaments to determine who gets control.

Oh, and Amazon is apparently feeding rare books into a shredder to help train AI.

AI was supposed to make the world smaller. Instead, it’s leaving fingerprints, drawing borders, eating our books, and occasionally starting fights with itself.

Read the full issue for free: https://pithycyborg.substack.com/p/ai-left-fingerprints-then-picked