PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A pharma regulatory assistant answers questions over 80-page text-based submission PDFs, and reviewers must click through to the exact supporting sentence. The prompt says 'quote your sources', and an audit found 8 percent of quoted sentences do not exist in the documents.
Which design guarantees that every quoted sentence appears verbatim in the submitted PDF?
Answering here is anonymous. Nothing is saved unless you sign in.
Show answer and explanation
Answer: Pass the PDFs as document blocks with citations enabled and render the returned cited_text
With the citations feature the API extracts cited_text directly from the supplied document, so citations are guaranteed to contain valid pointers into the provided documents rather than generated text, and Anthropic's evaluations found it cites the most relevant quotes significantly more often than prompt-based approaches. Narrowing the input or lowering temperature still leaves the quote to free-form generation, which is what produced the 8 percent that do not exist.
Official Source: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/citations ↗