Warning over citations and sources
Claude customers ought to be warned that enormous language fashions (LLMs) like those who energy Claude are notorious for sneaking in plausible-sounding confabulated sources. A recent survey of citation accuracy by LLM-based internet search assistants confirmed a 60 % error price. That specific examine didn’t embody Anthropic’s new search function as a result of it happened earlier than this present launch.
When utilizing internet search, Claude gives citations for info 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 total accuracy. Anthropic didn’t launch any search accuracy benchmarks, so impartial researchers will seemingly study that over time.
A screenshot instance of what Anthropic Claude’s internet search citations appear like, captured March 21, 2025.
Credit score:
Benj Edwards
Even when Claude search had been, say, 99 % correct (a quantity we’re making up as an illustration), the 1 % likelihood 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 objective, vet it very rigorously utilizing a number of impartial non-AI sources.
A partnership with Courageous below the hood
Behind the scenes, it seems like Anthropic partnered with Brave Search to energy the search function, from an organization, Courageous Software program, maybe greatest identified for its web browser app. Courageous Search markets itself as a “personal search engine,” which feels in step with how Anthropic likes to market itself as an moral different to Massive Tech merchandise.
Simon Willison found the connection between Anthropic and Courageous via Anthropic’s subprocessor list (a listing of third-party providers that Anthropic makes use of for information 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 ‘Fascinating 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 own outputs, which referenced “BraveSearchParams” properties.
The Courageous engine below the hood has implications for people, organizations, or corporations that may wish to block Claude from accessing their websites, since presumably Courageous’s internet crawler is doing the online indexing. Anthropic didn’t point out how websites or corporations may choose out of the function. Now we have reached out to Anthropic for clarification.