Warning over citations and sources
Claude customers needs to be warned that enormous language fashions (LLMs) like people who energy Claude are infamous for sneaking in plausible-sounding confabulated sources. A latest survey of quotation accuracy by LLM-based internet search assistants confirmed a 60 p.c error charge. That individual research 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 data it consists of from on-line sources, ostensibly serving to customers confirm info. 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 unbiased researchers will possible look at 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 p.c correct (a quantity we’re making up as an illustration), the 1 p.c probability it’s fallacious might come again to hang-out you later if you happen to belief it blindly. Earlier than accepting any supply of data delivered by Claude (or any AI assistant) for any significant objective, vet it very rigorously utilizing a number of unbiased non-AI sources.
A partnership with Courageous beneath the hood
Behind the scenes, it seems to be like Anthropic partnered with Courageous Search to energy the search function, from an organization, Courageous Software program, maybe finest recognized for its internet 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 different to Huge Tech merchandise.
Simon Willison found the connection between Anthropic and Courageous by way of Anthropic’s subprocessor record (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 info. He wrote, “It ran a seek for ‘Fascinating pelican info’ 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 beneath the hood has implications for people, organizations, or corporations that may need to block Claude from accessing their websites since, presumably, Courageous’s internet crawler is doing the net indexing. Anthropic didn’t point out how websites or corporations might decide out of the function. We have now reached out to Anthropic for clarification.
