AI Watermark Evidence Fails Forensic Readiness: An Empirical Evaluation
The EU AI Act calls for markings that are "sufficiently reliable and robust." California's SB 942 requires disclosure that is "permanent or extraordinarily difficult to remove." Both mandates rest on an untested assumption: that watermark detection yields evidence reliable enough for courts. We evaluate three representative LLM watermarking methods -- KGW, Unigram, and the MarkLLM implementation of SynthID-Text -- against the Daubert admissibility criteria and the NIST SP 800-86 digital forensic process. To structure this evaluation, we propose a Forensic Readiness Score (FRS) framework with 12 criteria, three mandatory gates, and a 60-point scoring system.
- ▪The EU AI Act calls for markings that are "sufficiently reliable and robust." California's SB 942 requires disclosure that is "permanent or extraordinarily difficult to remove." Both mandates rest on an untested assumption: that watermark d
- ▪We evaluate three representative LLM watermarking methods -- KGW, Unigram, and the MarkLLM implementation of SynthID-Text -- against the Daubert admissibility criteria and the NIST SP 800-86 digital forensic process.
- ▪To structure this evaluation, we propose a Forensic Readiness Score (FRS) framework with 12 criteria, three mandatory gates, and a 60-point scoring system.
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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2607.16010 (cs) [Submitted on 17 Jul 2026] Title:AI Watermark Evidence Fails Forensic Readiness: An Empirical Evaluation Authors:Saifur Rahman Tamim, Amir Labib Khan View a PDF of the paper titled AI Watermark Evidence Fails Forensic Readiness: An Empirical Evaluation, by Saifur Rahman Tamim and Amir Labib Khan View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Governments are increasingly mandating that LLM-generated content carry watermarks. The EU AI Act calls for markings that are "sufficiently reliable and robust." California's SB 942 requires disclosure that is "permanent or extraordinarily difficult to remove." Both mandates rest on an untested assumption: that watermark detection yields evidence reliable enough for courts.
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