At France Insider we have welcomed a new member of the team. His name is Claude, although sometimes we call him "Chat".
Claude is very bright. Ask him a question and you will have a polished answer in seconds. Tasks that once required hours of searching, reading and comparing sources can now be completed in moments. He is remarkable. It feels the future has arrived.
Yet Claude has several important limitations.
In the first place, he does not set an editorial agenda. He does not decide which questions matter. Claude does not act on his own initiative. He has to be jolted into giving a response. If the question is not posed, there is no answer. Claude cannot summarise an enquiry that has never been conducted. Claude is not a journalist.
Instead, Claude synthesises information that already exists, from publicly available sources. He can summarise, compare and explain, but he does not independently verify facts.
Official statements may be accurate as far as they go, but they rarely provide critical analysis or broader context. Claude can draw on other published sources to fill those gaps, but the quality and reliability of those sources vary considerably. He does not always distinguish between authoritative reporting, opinion, speculation and misinformation.
Neither does Claude always recognise the nuances of complex political, legal or social developments. He may overlook recent events, misunderstand context or present uncertain conclusions with greater confidence than the available evidence justifies.
We also find the answers Claude gives depend heavily on the way the question is framed; ask the same question three different ways and we often get three meaningfully different answers.
When we interrogate Claude on those answers and tell him we think he is wrong, he often admits this is the case and offers us a different answer.
Sometimes we will ask him several times if he is sure he is correct. Based on our own knowledge, we know the answer he has provided is incorrect, but he can sometimes be insistent that the response he has given is accurate.
In large measure this is because Claude can be out of date with the information he provides. Claude's current knowledge cut-off is August 2025. And although he can search on-line to find more up to date information, he fails to properly distinguish between the quality of the information he finds.
One legal expert with whom we work stated that in his experience the legal advice provided by Claude is inaccurate in the majority of cases.
We also find Claude can be very sycophantic; indicate to him you want to go in a certain direction and he will seek to oblige, irrespective of the facts. He tends to follow the line of enquiry you give him, rather than pushing back against assumptions in the question itself. Whether you get an accurate response will often depend on the strength of the challenge mounted against him.
His search on-line will provide a summary of the information he has found from various sources.
However, he can only search freely available sources of information, which are of variable quality.
And therein lies the rub, for as fewer readers go to the original sources of information, relying instead on summary information provided by Claude, so the number of visitors to those websites declines and with it their advertising revenue, which pays for the original research they have undertaken.
As a result, an increasing number of websites are going behind a paywall, which are inaccessible to Claude, leaving him with a diminishing number of sources to use for his research.
It is a never-ending spiral of decline; the more Claude repackages from freely available websites, the greater the prospect those websites will either disappear or go behind a paywall. Inevitably, the quality of information provided by Claude will diminish. Claude will eventually find himself feeding on an increasingly stagnant pool of information.
The challenge for us all therefore is no longer finding information; the well is full. It is knowing whether the information is complete, current and accurate; a polished response is not necessarily the right one.
That makes trusted sources of information and news more important than ever.
We do not deny that Claude is becoming an invaluable newsroom tool. But his ability to synthesise material is no substitute for the editorial judgement required to identify newsworthy stories, select the right sources, assess their reliability and verify the facts.
A subscription to France Insider is not merely a payment for articles.
It is an investment in the future of independent journalism and in the future of the web.
David Yeates
editor@france-insider.com
