The Volokh Conspiracy

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AI in Court

Seemingly Nonexistent Citation in Anthropic Expert's Declaration

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


The Declaration filed by a "Data Scientist at Anthropic" in Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC includes this citation:

But the cited article doesn't seem to exist at that citation or at that URL, and Google found no other references to any article by that title.

Bloomberg (Annelise Levy) has a story about this, under the title "Anthropic Expert Accused of Citing Fake Article in AI Lawsuit" (Chat GPT Is Eating the World links to that). Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen ordered the parties, apparently (according to Bloomberg) referring to this problem, to explain matters:

[N]o later than May 15, 2025, Defendant shall file a Statement addressing the issue raised by Plaintiffs' counsel at the outset of the hearing ….

I'll report what the Statement asserts once it is filed. Thanks to Prof. Edward Lee for the pointer.

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any institution.