Seemingly Nonexistent Citation in Anthropic Expert’s Declaration [UPDATE: Apparently Caused by Lawyer’s Misuse of Claude to Format Citations]

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.

UPDATE 5/15/25, 4:17 pm: Here’s the explanation, from one of Anthropic’s lawyers (emphasis added):

Our investigation of the matter confirms that this was an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority. The first citation in footnote 3 of Dkts. 340-3 (sealed) and 341-2 (public) includes an erroneous author and title, while providing a correct link to, and correctly identifying the publication, volume, page numbers, and year of publication of, the article referenced by Ms. Chen as part of the basis for her statement in paragraph 9. We apologize for the inaccuracy and any confusion this error caused.

The American Statistician article reviewed and relied upon by Ms. Chen [the Anthropic expert], and accessible at the first link provided in footnote 3 of Dkts. 340-3 and 341-2, is titled Binomial Confidence Intervals for Rare Events: Importance of Defining Margin of Error Relative to Magnitude of Proportion, by Owen McGrath and Kevin Burke. A Latham & Watkins associate located that article as potential additional support for Ms. Chen’s testimony using a Google search. The article exists and

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