A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday.
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.”
Earlier this week, lawyers representing Universal Music Group and other music publishers accused Anthropic’s expert witness — one of the company’s employees, Olivia Chen — of using Claude to cite fake articles in her testimony. Federal judge, Susan van Keulen, then ordered Anthropic to respond to these allegations.
The music publishers lawsuit is one of several disputes between copyright owners and tech companies over the supposed misuse of their work to create generative AI tools.
This is the latest instance of lawyers using AI in court, and then regretting the decision. Earlier this week, a California judge slammed a pair of law firms for submitting “bogus AI-generated research” in his court. In January, an Australian lawyer was caught using ChatGPT in the preparation of court documents and the chatbot produced faulty citations.
However, these errors aren’t stopping startups from raising enormous rounds to automate legal work. Harvey, which uses generative AI models to assist lawyers, is reportedly in talks to raise over $250 million at a $5 billion valuation.
