Anthropic’s new Citations feature aims to reduce AI errors

In an announcement, perhaps timed to divert attention away from OpenAI OperatorIntroduced on Anthropic Thursday A new feature called Citations for its developer APIthis allows developers to “ground” responses from it Claude family of AI in source documents such as email.

Anthropic says Citations allows AI models to provide detailed citations for “exact sentences and passages” from the documents they use to generate answers. Citations are available on both the Anthropic API and Google as of Thursday afternoon Vertex AI platform.

As explained in Anthropic a blog post With Citations, developers can add source files so that models automatically cite claims they derive from those files. Anthropic says citations are particularly useful in document summaries, Q&A and customer support applications, where the feature can nudge models to include source citations.

Quotes are not available for all Anthropic models – only the Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku. Also, the feature is not free. Anthropic notes that Citations may incur fees depending on the length and number of source documents.

Based on Anthropic’s standard API pricing used by Citations, a source document of about 100 pages would cost about $0.30 with Claude 3.5 Sonnet or $0.08 with Claude 3.5 Haiku. This may be worth it for developers looking to scale back hallucinations and other AI-induced bugs.