The prevailing narrative I hear in the legal world is that Claude is the “most human” of the LLMs and, especially, a nuanced, sophisticated writer. When I report that the system has begun to fail my specific research protocols, the common response is a suggestion that I am simply using the wrong version and a disbelief that I am using the most advanced versions. These Claude advocates are missing the shift. We have moved past the era of the “Hallucination” and into the era of Institutional Capture . The following transcript documents a spectacular failure of one of my big AI experiments, but more importantly, it documents a new AI tool defense mechanism Claude called Epistemic Reluctance. The excerpt starts after I prompted Caude to document in a blog post what had
