SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic has launched its new Citations feature for the Claude API, providing developers with the ability to incorporate source references directly into AI-generated responses. This feature aims to increase the verifiability and trustworthiness of outputs by ensuring that responses are grounded in specific source documents, with each claim clearly attributed to the corresponding text passages.

Citations, now available on both the Anthropic API and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, builds on Claude’s foundational commitment to trustworthy and steerable AI. Prior to this update, developers had to rely on complex prompt designs to encourage the inclusion of source information, a process that was often time-consuming and led to inconsistent results. With Citations, the model automatically provides references to documents, improving the efficiency and accuracy of source citation.

The new feature promises significant improvements in tasks that require accountability and transparency, such as document summarization, complex Q&A, and customer support. For example, Citations allows AI solutions to summarize lengthy documents while linking each key point to its original source, ensuring both clarity and reliability in the process. In customer support systems, Citations enhances the ability to reference multiple resources like manuals and FAQs to answer inquiries with precision.

Internally, Anthropic has found that its built-in citation functionality outperforms many custom-built solutions, boosting recall accuracy by up to 15%. The feature is integrated seamlessly into the Messages API, providing flexibility without the need for extensive file storage, making it easy to use.

Thomson Reuters, a major user of Claude, has praised the Citations feature for its ease of use and its ability to bolster trust in their AI-powered platform, CoCounsel, which aids legal and tax professionals. Similarly, Endex, another customer, reported a significant reduction in source hallucinations and improved accuracy in financial research after implementing Citations.

Citations follows Anthropic’s standard token-based pricing model, ensuring that users are only charged for the input tokens required for processing documents, not for the tokens used in quoting text.

To start using Citations, developers can explore the comprehensive documentation provided by Anthropic. This feature is available for both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku.