A federal court filing: the citation Claude polished into fiction
In a music-publisher copyright case against Anthropic, a declaration cited a real journal article: correct link, correct volume, correct pages. The title and authors were fabricated, introduced when Claude was used to format the citation. Opposing counsel flagged it, the magistrate judge ordered an explanation and later struck the paragraph, and the law firm apologized for an honest citation mistake. Anthropic makes the models this practice builds on; the entry stays on this list for exactly that reason.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- Latham & Watkins; Anthropic
- When
- May 13, 2025
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- Opposing counsel or a claimant counsel Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- A human verification step. A person who reads generated output before it ships, with the specific job of checking claims. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure → A recorded run of a certificate gate refusing a bad document →
- What would have caught it
- A citation check that opens each cited work and compares title and authors, not only the link and page numbers.
- Sources
-
- TechCrunch primary
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. The cited article exists. Its link, volume, pages and year were correct; its title and authors were fabricated. The magistrate judge later struck the paragraph, and the firm called it an honest citation mistake. Verified against the primary source on August 12, 2026. Published on this site August 13, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →