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International Business Times UK
International Business Times UK
Technology
Andrea Gabrielle Prado

AO3 Readers Found Claude Code Hidden in Fan Fiction — Then the Community Turned on Itself

Fan fiction readers have been combing through works on AO3 to weed out AI-assisted or -generated works. But the detection procedure is far from foolproof (Credit: Darius Bashar/Unsplash)

Fan-fiction readers hunting for undisclosed artificial intelligence use on Archive of Our Own uncovered something far more concrete than suspiciously slick prose: hidden Claude chatbot code embedded in dozens of posted stories.

On 29 June, an anonymous X account released a 25-page document titled 'Fandom Has a Hidden Generative AI Problem'. It described how text copied directly from Anthropic's Claude chatbot into AO3's rich-text editor could retain distinctive HTML formatting that ordinary readers would not see.

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