Claude is going to watermark your work

Hey guys,

just sat down with a coffee coconut water 😋

lets dive in

📌 TL;DR

• Everyone is furious about the Claude watermark → it isn't switched on yet, and the tool everyone's sharing to beat it doesn't work either
• Anthropic's free AI school is live → around 20 short courses, a quiz at the end of each one, completely free
• Claude can now send your emails natively → no external connector needed, and it asks you before every single send
• Sharing skills with your team → skills are single player right now, and here's the fix

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Claude will watermark your text (everyone is furious)

Anthropic announced they plan to add invisible watermarks to future Claude models.

Okay so I mentioned last week that Anthropic is putting an invisible watermark inside everything Claude writes. Since then the internet has properly lost it. People are cancelling their subscriptions over it.

The EU passed a law. From 2 August, AI companies have to mark AI-written text or get fined.

Future Claude models will hide an invisible watermark in anything they write. You won't see it. A detector will.

To clarify, the watermark shows Claude touched the text. It doesn't show that Claude wrote it. Anthropic's own wording is that it "indicates Claude processed text, not that it necessarily was the original author".

It's not switched on just yet as no new models have been released since this announcement.

I'm honestly not too fussed about it, since I don't see how it's gonna have any impact on my business.

The tool everyone is sharing doesn't work either

There's a free tool going round called watermarks-remover, 16,000 bookmarks in ten days.

For files it's great. Claude hides "AI made this" data inside images and PDFs, and this strips it out.

For text it doesn't work. Its own instructions list Claude as a placeholder. All it does is get a cheaper AI to rewrite your work until the pattern's gone. So you're not removing the watermark, you're throwing away Claude's writing and keeping a worse model's instead.

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Anthropic's free AI school is live

Anthropic pushed Claude Academy live at academy.claude.com on August 20, 2026.

This is actually how I learnt the basics back when Claude Code was new. They've made it way better and more refined now.

It's roughly 20 free, self-paced courses, hosted on Skilljar, across three tiers:

• Non-technical: "Claude 101" (beginner fundamentals),
• Developer: building with the Claude API, "Claude Code 101" and "Claude Code in Action, MCP's ect.. (Don't let the word developer scare you.)
• Platform: Claude via Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, the Claude Console.

But it's pretty cool. They're really short, quick, easy-to-understand lessons that pretty much cover everything. Each course ends in a quiz, and it's completely free.

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Claude can now natively send your emails

On August 18, 2026 Anthropic upgraded the Google Workspace connector from read-only to read & write. Claude can now send, reply to, and forward Gmail.

Before this, you would have to have an external connector like Composio if you wanted to send emails. Now you can just send them natively in Claude as long as you connect the Gmail connector in the connectors page. It's pretty cool if you're non-technical and actually want to experiment with sending emails with AI.

Claude asks for your approval by default before each of these actions. Every send, reply and forward. Every share, move and trash. Approval first.

You can flip individual tools to "Always allow", but I'd leave that switched off for anything client-facing.

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Also this week...

Slack now has AI coding agents built into it → tag Claude Code into a message and it opens its own channel to go build the thing, and your team approves it before anything ships. Works on the free plan.

Someone built a free open source version of Grok Bot → same idea, every AI teammate gets its own computer and its own logins, except it's free and you run it yourself. (Might have to try this one out.)

This button makes Claude Code less annoying → there's a new Concise output style that just gives you the answer instead of talking you through every step first. Type /config, hit output style, pick Concise.

ChatGPT now has a teen version → it guesses your age and quietly moves you onto a locked down version, and parents get alerts but still can't read the chats. Lands properly in Australia on 8 September.

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💡 Builder's notes

Sharing skills with your team

For anyone who doesn't know what a skill is. It's an SOP for your AI. A step-by-step instruction book you write once, so you're not re-explaining how you like things done every single time you open a new chat.

Here's the problem nobody really talks about. Skills are single player right now. You've got your Claude, your mate's got his Claude, and they don't talk to each other at all.

It's Google Docs before sharing existed. Everyone emailing the file back and forth, twelve copies floating around, nobody sure which one is the real one.

That's exactly where we are with skills.

The fix is backing them up to GitHub (which is basically Google Drive but for code) and then turning that folder into a plugin so Claude can actually read it.

Three things you get out of it:

1. Your skills can never get deleted.
2. You can switch AI models and your skills migrate over with you.
3. One source of truth instead of eleven copies quietly drifting apart.

I just watched this video that walks through all of this by Remy and Greg Isenberg. It's really valuable.

It's 32 minutes and it's the most up to date thing on skills I've seen.

Most of it is about sharing skills across a whole team, which I'm not doing just yet so that part wasn't really for me. But the backup and the model-switching bit applies to literally everyone. And there's a free prompt sitting in the description that does the entire setup for you.

Notion quietly shipped its own version of this over the weekend of the 15th.

Skills now live in your library, admins can push them to everyone, and you can download one for Claude or Codex in a click. The catch is that download is a one-way copy that goes stale the moment someone edits the original. So it solves sharing inside Notion, not the thing above.

Building websites with Claude Code

Okay, so I've been building websites with Claude Code for a while now, and I've got it down pretty well at this point.

Here's what I've realised though. Most people have no idea how to get good design out of Claude. They ask for a website, they get back straight AI slop and they assume that's just what it does. It isn't. And I'm not gonna lie, it's not crazy. I honestly think it requires a lot of creativity and taste. And the more creative you are as a person, the better your website's gonna be. But still, most people are missing that whole layer that gets it 70% of the way there.

I've got a proper system for it now. The inspiration sites I pull from, the font sites I use, the Claude skills. All of it collected over months of building real sites.

I'm thinking about handing you guys the entire thing in an upcoming newsletter

So tell me if you'd actually want it. Just hit reply to this email and tell me if you're keen, and anything specific you'd want to know :)

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🧰 Tools to try

ScrapeGraph AI → free scraper for Claude Code. Describe the leads or data you want in plain English, it goes and gets it.

marketing-council → the LLM council skill, but for marketing. Give it a decision and twelve famous marketers argue it out. Ogilvy, Seth Godin, Hormozi and the rest. One of them always gets told to argue against you, so you hear the downside too.

Can I Vibecode It? → 1,093 paid apps, each with a straight answer on whether you could just build it yourself. Yes, kinda, or not really. If it's a yes, it hands you the exact prompt to paste into Claude Code, plus an honest list of what you'd lose by not paying. (Been wanting something like this, I'm addicted to vibe coding my way out of paid apps 😅)

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💎 Cool finds

Elon Musk on why nobody is going to "control" AI → his take in 37 seconds: it'll be too smart to control, so the job is less like programming a machine and more like raising a super-genius kid and hoping the values stick.

A 19-year-old Australian just raised $1.2m to build drone cowboys → Sam Rogers's company Brumby makes drones that muster cattle on their own, with nobody flying them. They're already running across 1.7 million acres.

How to remember everything you read → two minutes long and one of the useful things I've watched lately. I've changed how I read because of it.

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Have an amazing weekend.

Peace out.