anthropic-2025-answer-gating-circuit-hallucination

Summary

Anthropic's 2025 research found that Claude has a specific internal mechanism that acts like a "don't answer yet" gate, blocking output when the model lacks sufficient information, and that made-up answers appear when this gate fails to hold. This turns hallucination from a vague whole-model problem into a pinpoint engineering target: if researchers can strengthen or repair that specific gating pathway, they have a concrete lever for reducing fabrication rather than just hoping better data or alignment will fix it.