WarsawResearchers found hundreds of fake manuscripts crediting AI-invented scientists.

Many carry real digital object identifiers, so scholarly databases and search engines can index them.

Claude Sonnet 4 paired invented volcanologists Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen in about 23% of the researchers’ prompts.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 no longer produces the pairing, and signs suggest the problem has eased since the June preprint.

Michał Brzozowski, a co-author, does not know why Claude favoured those names.

How each outlet framed it
Nature leans critical
identifies recurring AI-generated fake identities by model—Claude's Vasquez/Chen, Gemini's Aris Thorne/Lena Petrova, GPT's Elara Voss—infiltrating scientific literature

Sources: Nature