Flutterby™! : More making up legal citations

Anthropic’s lawyer was forced to apologize after Claude hallucinated a legal citation

Claude hallucinated the citation with “an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors,” Anthropic says in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg. Anthropic’s lawyers explain that their “manual citation check” did not catch it, nor several other errors that were caused by Claude’s hallucinations.

Anthropic apologized for the error and called it “an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority.”

Anthropic's lawyers take blame for AI 'hallucination' in music publishers' lawsuit. The Latham & Watkins rep...

Ivana Dukanovic said in a court filing that the expert had relied on a legitimate academic journal article, but Dukanovic created a citation for it using Anthropic's chatbot Claude, which made up a fake title and authors in what the attorney called "an embarrassing and unintentional mistake."

But, hey, it apparently got the journal title and year right.

This was apparently in the UMG v Anthropic lawsuit, which is exploring the edges of copyright law and, interestingly, seems like Anthropic is arguing for more of the "AI crumple zone" space where they blame the user for asking the LLM to generate the piracy. Which... is gonna make some of these music generation systems like Suno very interesting.

More in this Bluesky thread, including Latham & Watkins Hosts First-of-its-Kind AI Academy and Latham’s AI Academy Wins 2025 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Award which... ya know, if the judge lets them get away with this bullshit without censure, maybe they are leaders?

Edit: Pivot To AI on the topic, "[Declaration, PDF; case docket; Reuters, archive]"