Natural Language Processing

Why AI Chatbots Lie to Us

Melanie Mitchell
Santa Fe Institute
July 24, 2025
Abstract
A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic's generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agreed to perform the task, generated a computer program to download the data, and handed over perfectly formatted results. The only problem? My colleague immediately noticed that the data Claude delivered was entirely fabricated.
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