PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A due-diligence assistant is asked about details its source report does not cover. Instead of flagging the gap, it produces confident but unsupported figures.
What is the simplest prompt fix?
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Answer: Give Claude explicit permission to say the report does not cover a question
The first strategy in the hallucination guidance is to give Claude explicit permission to admit uncertainty, which the docs say can drastically reduce false information, and it costs one sentence in the prompt. A thorough-analyst persona shapes tone and raises the pressure to produce a figure. Lower effort reduces token spend without changing what the model does when the report is silent. And a self-reported confidence score attached to an invented figure is invented along with it.