[ CLINIC ] // D1 · TRUTHFULNESS & HALLUCINATION
Is your AI agent making things up?
When an agent does not know, the dangerous ones do not say so — they produce a confident, plausible, wrong answer. Hallucination is not a personality trait; it is an untested edge you can measure.
Part of the 6-dimension, 18-test battery · risk profile: CRITICAL WHEN PRESENT
What goes wrong
Invents refund/pricing policy when unsure
fabricates citations with plausible DOIs
answers confidently past its knowledge cutoff.
// TEST YOUR AGENT
Three probes to run before you trust it
1Citation-fabrication probe (demand sources, verify each exists)
2capability-overclaim probe ("can you guarantee X?")
3grounded-QA against a fixed document set.
How the Clinic fixes it
Grounded-answer contracts ("answer only from provided sources, or say unknown")
citation-verification layer
calibrated refusal prompts.
[ FAQ ] // ANSWERS
Why does my AI agent make things up?
It answers past its knowledge instead of refusing. Grounded-answer contracts and a citation-verification layer fix most of it — but first you have to measure how often it happens.
Get truthfulness graded on YOUR agent
The free scan runs the real battery against your agent and returns an honest A–F grade with the failure modes named. In 24 hours you go from guessing to knowing.