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How to Set Up the Claude Watermark Remover

Set up Watermarks Remover locally, connect its Claude skill, and understand the limits of statistical text-watermark rewriting.

Anthropic has begun adding machine-readable watermarks to text from supported Claude models. They are not visible tags or hidden characters: they are carried in subtle word-choice patterns in the text itself.

Watermarks Remover is an open-source project by Guillaume Meyer. Its Claude skill connects to a local service on your computer and can inspect or rewrite content that you own or are authorised to process.

What you need

This is more than a single SKILL.md file. The skill is a client for Watermarks Remover's local service.

You need the Watermarks Remover repository, the remove-ai-marks skill, and the service running locally. Python 3.10 or newer is the simplest setup.

1. Download the project

Clone the repository in Terminal, or download it as a ZIP from GitHub and open the extracted folder.

git clone https://github.com/guillaumemeyer/watermarks-remover.git
cd watermarks-remover

2. Find the Claude skill

Inside the project, open skills/remove-ai-marks/. It contains the skill instructions and its supporting references.

The skill is called remove-ai-marks. The project also documents the older remove-claude-marks alias.

skills/
└── remove-ai-marks/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── references/

3. Start the local service

From the repository folder, start the service. It listens on your own computer at http://127.0.0.1:8765 by default.

make serve

Or run the server directly:

python3 service/scripts/server.py --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8765

Leave that Terminal window open. In a second window, check that it is healthy:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8765/health

4. Package and upload the skill

Claude expects a ZIP that contains the skill folder. Do not place SKILL.md directly at the root of the ZIP.

remove-ai-marks.zip
└── remove-ai-marks/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── references/

In Claude, go to Customize → Skills, choose Create skill → Upload a skill, upload the ZIP, and make sure it is enabled.

5. Use it

Open a Claude conversation, invoke the skill, then provide the text or file you want to inspect or process.

/remove-ai-marks

The project can work with invisible Unicode characters, statistical text patterns, C2PA provenance, EXIF/XMP metadata, and provenance data in supported documents and media. For statistical text watermarks, it uses rewriting to change the word-choice patterns that may carry the mark.

What this can and cannot confirm

Copying and pasting Claude text preserves its wording, so a statistical watermark may travel with it. Light edits may leave enough of the pattern detectable; a substantial rewrite can disrupt that pattern.

That does not guarantee removal. Claude's official detector and detection key are not public, so a third-party tool cannot certify that text will not be detected by a future official detector. Treat rewriting as a best-effort process and review the result carefully.

Only process content you own or are authorised to process. Do not use provenance-removal tools to misrepresent AI-assisted work where disclosure is required.