Citation Errors in Concord Music v. Anthropic Attributed to Claude AI Use by Defense Counsel

May 15, 2025

In a recent filing in Universal Music Group et al. v. Anthropic, the defense counsel admitted errors in expert witness testimony submissions. The issues revolved around incorrect citations generated by their Claude AI system. These inaccuracies, consisting of wrong article titles and author names, were missed during manual reviews. Anthropic acknowledged the honest mistake, apologizing in court. JOIN US to learn how Project Cerebellum's AI governance framework could help prevent such incidents through the Measure function of HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.630, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 2.2 — similarity 0.622, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.618, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: anthropic
Alleged developer: anthropic
Alleged harmed parties: anthropic, judicial-integrity, judicial-process, ivana-dukanovic, brittany-n.-lovejoy, joseph-r.-wetzel, andrew-m.-gass, allison-l.-stillman, sarang-v.-damle, sara-e.-sampoli, rachel-s.-horn, latham-and-watkins-llp

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1074

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.