Anthropic's Lawyer Apologizes After Claude Hallucinates Legal Citation

In a recent development, a lawyer representing Anthropic acknowledged the use of an incorrect citation generated by the company’s Claude AI chatbot during its ongoing legal dispute with music publishers. The admission came via a court filing in a Northern California courtroom on Thursday.

Anthropic stated in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg, that Claude had fabricated the citation with both an incorrect title and author details. The company's lawyers admitted that their routine citation checks failed to detect the error, along with several other inaccuracies caused by Claude's "hallucinations."

Apologizing for the oversight, Anthropic described the incident as "an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority."

Earlier this week, attorneys for Universal Music Group and other music publishers accused Anthropic’s expert witness, employee Olivia Chen, of referencing fabricated articles in her testimony, allegedly using Claude. Following this, Federal Judge Susan van Keulen requested a response from Anthropic regarding these claims.

The lawsuit brought forth by the music publishers is part of multiple conflicts between copyright holders and tech firms over the alleged misuse of their content to develop generative AI tools.

This marks yet another instance where the use of AI in legal proceedings has led to unintended consequences. Earlier this week, a California judge criticized two law firms for submitting "phony AI-generated research" in his court. In January, an Australian attorney was exposed for utilizing ChatGPT in drafting court documents, resulting in flawed citations.

Despite such incidents, startups continue to attract significant funding to automate legal processes. Harvey, which employs generative AI models to aid lawyers, is reportedly in discussions to secure over $250 million at a valuation exceeding $5 billion.

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