Description: In a legal filing in Universal Music Group et al. v. Anthropic, lawyers for Anthropic acknowledged that expert witness testimony submitted in the case contained erroneous citations generated by the company's Claude AI system. The filing stated that the inaccuracies, which included incorrect article titles and author names, were not caught during manual review. Anthropic characterized the issue as an honest mistake and apologized in court.
Editor Notes: The declaration of Ivana Dukanovic related to ECF no. 365 can be read here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25943457/anthropic-515-filing.pdf. This incident record includes the names of the attorneys who submitted a court filing containing erroneous citations attributed to generative AI use. Their names are drawn directly from the public docket of Concord Music Group, Inc. et al. v. Anthropic PBC. Inclusion here reflects their formal authorship of the document in question. The declaration submitted by Dukanovic acknowledges the citation errors and describes the circumstances of their introduction. That statement is an early example of what may become a new genre of legal apology shaped by AI-assisted work. This record aims to document how such tools are being integrated (sometimes uneasily) into professional and institutional practice.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Anthropic and Claude developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed 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 and Latham & Watkins LLP.
Alleged implicated AI system: Claude
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1074
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-05-15
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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.
Cla…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.