Lawyers for generative AI company Anthropic have apologized to a US federal court for using an incorrect citation generated by Anthropic\u2019s AI in a court filing.<\/p>\n
In a submission to the court on Thursday (May 15), Anthropic\u2019s lead counsel in the case, Ivana Dukanovic<\/strong> of law firm Latham Watkins<\/strong>, apologized \u201cfor the inaccuracy and any confusion this error caused,\u201d but said that Anthropic\u2019s Claude chatbot didn\u2019t invent the academic study cited by Anthropic\u2019s lawyers \u2013 it got the title and authors wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cOur investigation of the matter confirms that this was an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority,\u201d Dukanovic wrote in her submission, which can be read in full here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The court case in question was brought<\/a> by music publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group<\/strong>, Concord<\/strong>, and ABKCO<\/strong> in 2023, accusing Anthropic of using copyrighted lyrics to train the Claude chatbot, and alleging that Claude regurgitates copyrighted lyrics when prompted by users.<\/p>\n Lawyers for the music publishers and Anthropic are debating how much information Anthropic needs to provide the publishers as part of the case\u2019s discovery process.<\/p>\n On April 30, an Anthropic employee and expert witness in the case, Olivia Chen<\/strong>, submitted a court filing in the dispute that cited a research study on statistics published in the journal The American Statistician<\/em>.<\/p>\n On Tuesday (May 13), lawyers for Anthropic said<\/a> they had tried to track down that paper, including by contacting one of the purported authors, but were told that no such paper existed.<\/p>\n In her submission to the court, Dukanovic said the paper in question<\/a> does exist \u2013 but Claude got the paper\u2019s name and authors wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cOur manual citation check did not catch that error. Our citation check also missed additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai,\u201d Dukanovic wrote.<\/p>\n She explained that it was Chen, and not the Claude chatbot, who found the paper, but Claude was asked to write the footnote referencing the paper.<\/p>\n \u201cOur investigation of the matter confirms that this was an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority.”<\/p>\n Ivana Dukanovic, lawyer representing Anthropic<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cWe have implemented procedures, including multiple levels of additional review, to work to ensure that this does not occur again and have preserved, at the Court\u2019s direction, all information related to Ms. Chen\u2019s declaration,\u201d Dukanovic wrote.<\/p>\n The incident is the latest in a growing number of legal cases where lawyers have used AI to speed up their work, only to have the AI \u201challucinate\u201d fake information.<\/p>\n One recent incident took place in Canada, where a lawyer arguing in front of the Ontario Superior Court is facing<\/a> a potential contempt of court charge after submitting a legal argument, apparently drafted by ChatGPT and other AI bots, that cited numerous nonexistent cases as precedent.<\/p>\n