THE CLAIM. Claude users are canceling en masse over the invisible watermark Anthropic switched on August 2 to comply with the EU AI Act's transparency code.

THE CHECK. count the evidence. Business Insider spoke with four Claude Max subscribers who canceled, and reports 'dozens' of X posts claiming the same; Gizmodo's own phrasing hedges to 'many supposed paying Claude users'. Against that, Anthropic says it has not seen a cancellation uptick. Nobody in this fight has published a real number: the coverage has anecdotes without a denominator, the company has a denial without data, and a cancellation screenshot costs nothing to post. What the wave-framing buries is the legitimate grievance underneath: the mark attaches when Claude merely touches text, and by Anthropic's own description 'a detected mark means Claude touched the text, not that Claude invented it'. Your essay, edited by Claude for commas, carries the same invisible stamp as a fully generated one, and the mark travels with copied text and survives some editing, into a world of employers and schools that will read any detected mark as an authorship verdict. Four people quitting is not a wave. The attribution problem is not a tweet.