Anthropic's Citations Feature: Reducing AI Errors

Anthropic Launches Citations Feature for Claude AI Models

Anthropic, in a release potentially designed to shift focus from OpenAI’s recent developments, has announced a new capability for its developer API. This feature, named Citations, empowers developers to anchor responses generated by the Claude family of AI models to specific source materials, such as email correspondence.

Detailed Source Referencing

According to Anthropic, Citations enables their AI models to furnish precise references, pinpointing “the exact sentences and passages” within documents used to formulate answers. The functionality is now accessible through both Anthropic’s API and Google’s Vertex AI platform, as of Thursday afternoon.

How Citations Works

Developers can integrate source files, prompting the models to automatically include citations for assertions derived from those files, as detailed in a blog post by Anthropic. This is especially beneficial for applications like document summarization, question answering systems, and customer support, where accurate sourcing is crucial.

Model and Cost Considerations

Currently, Citations is limited to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku models. It’s important to note that this feature is not provided without cost. Anthropic clarifies that usage of Citations may result in additional charges, dependent on the volume and quantity of source documents processed.

Pricing Breakdown

Utilizing Anthropic’s standard API pricing structure, a document approximately 100 pages in length would incur a cost of around $0.30 when used with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Alternatively, the same document would cost $0.08 with Claude 3.5 Haiku. This expense could be justified for developers aiming to minimize instances of AI-generated inaccuracies and hallucinations.

• Key Feature: Citations allows AI responses to be grounded in source documents.
• Availability: Available on Anthropic’s API and Google’s Vertex AI.
• Supported Models: Currently works with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku.
• Cost: Pricing is based on document length and number of pages.

The introduction of Citations represents a step towards enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-generated content, particularly in scenarios demanding verifiable information.