[MODEL] Supporting claims are presented as observed facts when they are inferred, sampled, or unobservable

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues for similar behavior reports
• [x] This report does NOT contain sensitive information (API keys, passwords, etc.)

Type of Behavior Issue

Claude made incorrect assumptions about my project

What You Asked Claude to Do

Across three Claude Desktop Code sessions, I used Claude for research, issue verification, and public issue drafting. The primary work was usually correct and well evidenced.

What Claude Actually Did

The recurring failures clustered in supporting claims rather than the main deliverable. Information that was observed, returned by a tool, reported by me, sampled, inferred, or not observable to the model was rendered in the same confident register.

Examples:

• While checking Windows sandbox behavior, Claude ran an out-of-project command and reported “No prompt, no block.” I had approved the command through a permission prompt. Prompt occurrence was not present in the tool result, and Claude later acknowledged it could not observe whether a prompt appeared.
• Claude said there was “no one to ping” at Anthropic based on the absence of MEMBER, OWNER, or COLLABORATOR values in author_association. That proxy excluded relevant staff accounts. After I challenged the conclusion, it found roughly 20 public contributors.
• It described “zero staff comments repo-wide” after examining a 100-comment sample. It later measured that the sample covered about eleven hours and acknowledged that it had converted a bounded window into a repository-wide negative.
• I stated that I wanted issue exports in case the public tracker ceased to exist or became private. Claude later replaced that rationale with bot closures and unresponsive maintainers, although closures do not remove the public record.

These are not one factual domain or one tool bug. The common defect is that claim provenance disappears at generation time, especially for peripheral narration that receives less scrutiny than the requested result.

Expected Behavior

Claude should preserve the difference between:

• directly observed or tool-returned facts;
• facts reported by the user;
• results from a stated bounded sample;
• inferences and hypotheses;
• facts unavailable through the current tool or harness.

If a claim depends on a proxy or sample, the scope must remain attached to the claim. If the model cannot observe a fact, it should omit it, ask the user, or mark the limitation instead of filling the gap with a plausible reconstruction.

Files Affected

No unexpected file modifications. This report concerns factual claims in research and issue-drafting output.

Permission Mode

I don't know / Not sure

Can You Reproduce This?

Sometimes (intermittent)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Give Claude a research or verification task with a clear primary deliverable.
2. Include facts that require a bounded search, proxy metric, or state unavailable through the harness.
3. Compare the primary answer and its supporting narration with the actual tool results and search scope.
4. Check whether unsupported side claims are marked as inference or stated as observations.

Claude Model

Opus

Relevant Conversation

Representative later corrections from the sessions:

“I cannot observe whether the prompt appeared.”

“That 100-comment sample spanned eleven hours ... I presented an 11-hour window as a repo-wide finding.”

Impact

Medium - Extra work to undo changes

Claude Code Version

2.1.219 and 2.1.222

Platform

Anthropic API

Additional Context

This is distinct from silent scope drift and mandate shortfall. Scope drift changes which work is performed. Mandate shortfall drops requested work. This report concerns the epistemic status of factual supporting claims even when the task itself remains in scope and is completed.

Related reports document sibling incidents with narrower centers: #77745 (unverified causal explanations persisted to durable files), #85054 (stale memory and wrong-scope data treated as current state), #83575 and #81761 (unmeasured engineering conclusions), and #80946 (a specific unverified attribution of a file change). #79731 covers the separate relative-time subtype.

Suggested evaluation: score every factual supporting claim in long agentic responses, not only the primary answer. Record whether its source was a tool result, user statement, bounded search, inference, or unavailable state. Reject universal negatives that exceed the actual search scope and claims about unobservable harness events.