Warning over citations and sources
Claude customers needs to be warned that giant language fashions (LLMs) like people who energy Claude are infamous for sneaking in plausible-sounding confabulated sources. A current survey of quotation accuracy by LLM-based net search assistants confirmed a 60 p.c error charge. That specific examine didn’t embody Anthropic’s new search function as a result of it occurred earlier than this present launch.
When utilizing net search, Claude offers citations for data it contains from on-line sources, ostensibly serving to customers confirm details. From our casual and unscientific testing, Claude’s search outcomes appeared pretty correct and detailed at a look, however that’s no assure of general accuracy. Anthropic didn’t launch any search accuracy benchmarks, so impartial researchers will doubtless study that over time.
A screenshot instance of what Anthropic Claude’s net search citations appear like, captured March 21, 2025.
Credit score:
Benj Edwards
Even when Claude search had been, say, 99 p.c correct (a quantity we’re making up as an illustration), the 1 p.c probability it’s mistaken could come again to hang-out you later should you belief it blindly. Earlier than accepting any supply of knowledge delivered by Claude (or any AI assistant) for any significant goal, vet it very rigorously utilizing a number of impartial non-AI sources.
A partnership with Courageous underneath the hood
Behind the scenes, it appears to be like like Anthropic partnered with Courageous Search to energy the search function, from an organization, Courageous Software program, maybe finest identified for its net browser app. Courageous Search markets itself as a “non-public search engine,” which feels in keeping with how Anthropic likes to market itself as an moral various to Large Tech merchandise.
Simon Willison found the connection between Anthropic and Courageous by means of Anthropic’s subprocessor listing (an inventory of third-party companies that Anthropic makes use of for knowledge processing), which added Courageous Search on March 19.
He additional demonstrated the connection on his weblog by asking Claude to seek for pelican details. He wrote, “It ran a seek for ‘Attention-grabbing pelican details’ and the ten outcomes it confirmed as citations had been a precise match for that search on Courageous.” He additionally discovered proof in Claude’s personal outputs, which referenced “BraveSearchParams” properties.
The Courageous engine underneath the hood has implications for people, organizations, or firms which may wish to block Claude from accessing their websites since, presumably, Courageous’s net crawler is doing the net indexing. Anthropic didn’t point out how websites or firms might decide out of the function. We’ve reached out to Anthropic for clarification.
