Claude Quote Extraction Prompt to Reduce Hallucinations

To keep Claude from going beyond the legal text, ask it to extract verbatim passages into <quotes> tags before it writes its analysis. Anthropic's prompting guide describes this quote-first step for long documents (it defines long as more than 20,000 tokens) and says it grounds the response in the provided material. The guide also says such techniques significantly reduce hallucinations but do not eliminate them, so check each quote against the original, and have a qualified person review anything high-stakes. The prompt below takes one contract. For several documents, wrap each one in its own document tags, as the post "Claude Long-Context Prompts: Put Documents First" shows.

<contract>{{PASTE_CONTRACT}}</contract>
Task: Analyze this agreement for unilateral price modification risks.
1. First, extract every clause creating a payment or pricing obligation verbatim into <quotes> tags.
2. Second, explain each clause in one plain-English sentence inside <explanation> tags.
3. Finally, list clauses allowing unilateral price hikes inside <risks> tags.