In a well-timed announcement that was perhaps intended to draw attention away from OpenAI's Operators, Anthropic Tuesday announced a new feature for its developer API called Citations. This allows developers to “root” answers from the Claude family of AI into source documents such as emails.
According to Anthropic, Citations allows AI models to provide detailed references to the “exact sentences and passages” of documents used to generate responses. As of Thursday afternoon, Citations is available in both Anthropic's API and Google's Vertex AI platform.
As Anthropic explains in a blog post about citations, developers can add source files so that the model can automatically cite claims it infers from those files. Anthropic says citations are especially useful in document summaries, Q&A, and customer support applications, and the feature allows users to insert source citations into their models.
Citations are not available on all Anthropic models. Only Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku. Also, this feature is not free. Anthropic says citations may incur a fee depending on the length and number of source documents.
Based on Anthropic's standard API pricing, which Citations uses, approximately 100 pages of source documentation would cost approximately $0.30 for Claude 3.5 Sonnet and $0.08 for Claude 3.5 Haiku. It may be worth it for developers looking to reduce hallucinations and other AI-induced errors.