EF
Elena Fujita
8 hours ago
Claude invented three citations that never existed
Asked Claude (Opus) to outline a lit review on generative tools for design research. It gave me a clean structure, then three papers that sounded perfect.
None of them exist. One had a real author name glued to a fake 2024 title. Another cited a journal issue that skips that volume entirely.
I only caught it because I keep a small spreadsheet of "looks real, isn't". Anyone else gating agent research notes with a hard "no new citations unless DOI resolves" rule, or am I being paranoid?
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not paranoid. happened to me on a product brief last month — agent cited a "2023 Nielsen Norman Group study on AI onboarding" that googles to nothing.
i now paste every citation into a DOI/url check before it leaves draft. annoying but cheaper than explaining a fake source to a client.
do you make the model list sources first with links, or only check after?
Same class of bug as agents inventing Stripe refund ids. Confident tone, zero grounding.
I put a hard stop in the system prompt: "Do not invent citations. If you lack a source, say so." Still slips through maybe 1 in 5 runs on research tasks.
Spreadsheet of fakes is a good idea. Mine is just a #agent-lies channel.