illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
A lawyer defending Anthropic had to clean up after the company’s AI bot, calling it “an embarrassing and unintentional mistake.”
In a copyright lawsuit over Anthropic’s use of music lyrics, the company’s legal team used its AI assistant, Claude, to help draft a citation in an expert report.
Claude provided the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, but “an inaccurate title and incorrect authors,” Anthropic’s lawyer said in a court filing on Thursday.
Attorney Ivana Dukanovic, of Latham & Watkins, said her team’s “manual citation check” failed to catch the mistake and “additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai.”
“This was an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority,” Dukanovic wrote.
Music publishers Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO sued Anthropic, saying the company used copyrighted lyrics to train Claude. The case is part of a wave of legal battles between copyright holders and AI companies.
The publishers’ attorney told the court on Tuesday that Anthropic data scientist Olivia Chen may have used a fake source generated by AI to support the company’s argument, Reuters reported.
On Thursday, Dukanovic responded that Chen cited a real article from the journal “The American Statistician,” but Claude had made up the title and authors.
Anthropic and Dukanovic did not respond to a request for comment.
AI in the legal world
It’s not the first time an AI tool has raised eyebrows in the legal world.
In March, a lawyerless man deployed an AI-generated avatar to argue his civil appeals case in a New York courtroom. A panel of stunned judges quickly shot him down.
AI hallucinations have also landed lawyers in hot water. An attorney was fired from Baker Law Group after he used ChatGPT to generate legal citations, which turned out to be fake.
Donald Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, also got into trouble when he used Google’s AI chatbot, Bard, to find legal cases to support his arguments. The chatbot made up the cases, and his lawyer filed them in court without checking.
Daniel Shin, the assistant director of research at the Center for Legal and Court Technology at Virginia’s William & Mary Law School, told Business Insider in a report last month that judges are concerned about the use of AI in the courts because of hallucinations.
Courts have shown they will not tolerate any improper use of AI tools, Shin said.
Still, lawyers are being told they need to start adopting AI.
At a legal-tech conference in March, lawyers were urged to embrace AI or risk falling behind, BI’s Melia Russell reported.
“Lawyers need to wake up,” Todd Itami, an attorney at the large legal defense firm Covington & Burling, said, adding that learning to use artificial intelligence was “imperative” for their success.
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