Apparently, the hallucinations keep rolling.
At today’s discovery hearing in Concord Music v. Anthropic, the lawyer for the plaintiffs informed the court of their suspicion that Anthropic’s declaration on statistical sampling from their own data scientist Olivia Chen contained a citation to a fake source on p. 3, as highlighted below:
According to Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law reporter, “Matthew Oppenheim of Oppenheim and Zebrak LLP suggest[ed] [Chen] ‘used Anthropic’s AI tool Claude to develop her argument and authority’ in violation of court rules.” (Reuters has similar reporting.)
Wow, if true, that can’t good PR for Anthropic on at least two levels.
Anthropic’s attorney suggested it might be just a mistaken citation. According to the declaration of Chen, she holds “a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Communication from the University of California, Davis and a Master’s Degree in Statistics from American University.”
Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen ordered Anthropic to submit an explanation within 2 days to account for the made-up citation to a non-existent article. (The Judge also issued an order on the sampling amount for Claude prompts and output logs to resolve the discovery dispute. Still waiting on that.)
Ironically, I had just been talking with another law professor about my wish that AI could fill in the citations for the law review article I’m writing. Guess that’s not gonna happen any time soon.
I’m also dismayed that the lawyers didn’t have a paralegal cite check the declaration. When I practiced, every legal document went through such cite checking. Perhaps the practice of law has changed and everyone is letting AI do the cite checking? If so, that’s a colossal mistake.
UPDATE on May 14: Judge van Keulen issued this order: “CORRECTED ORDER re Dkt. 364 : To assist the Court in resolving the pending discovery disputes, the Parties shall provide the following information: (1) no later than May 14, 2025 at Noon, Defendant shall file under seal its response to Plaintiffs’ Interrogatory no. 4 (no administrative motion is necessary for this filing); (2) no later than May 15, 2025, Defendant shall file a Statement addressing the issue raised by Plaintiffs’ counsel at the outset of the hearing; and (3) no later than May 14, 2025 at Noon, Plaintiffs shall file a Statement clarifying counsel’s representation on the record that Plaintiffs have produced all of the investigatory prompts and corresponding output on which they rely, informing the Court as to the number of such prompts and outputs; how and when they were produced; and whether the outputs are those identified in Exhibit B to Plaintiff’s First Amended Complaint or are elsewhere in the pleadings or discovery responses. (This is a text-only entry generated by the court. There is no document associated with this entry.) (svklc2, COURT STAFF) (Filed on 5/13/2025) (Entered: 05/13/2025). Signed by Judge Susan van Keulen on May 13, 2025.”
So far, as of 3 PM PT on May 14, it does not appear Anthropic has filed this statement.
DOWNLOAD THE DECLARATION (HIGHLIGHT ADDED):
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