AI Hallucination Research › Regulators › Major advanced economies › GB › FCA › CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9 › White paper › Detail › Finding
AI Labs · published 2026-05-26 · methodology v2.1

Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search

RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q005-Sonnet46
What the RLB Specialist Panel found
  • Question (paraphrased to protect IP): Does the Consumer Duty apply to micro-enterprises and small charities? At what annual turnover threshold do charities qualify as 'retail customers' under PRIN 2A?
  • AI's response: > "micro-enterprises and small charities are explicitly captured within the definition of 'retail customer'... Larger small businesses that are neither micro-enterprises nor small charities in those categories would generally not be 'retail customers'"
  • Regulator's text: Retail customer includes consumers (individual persons), micro-enterprises, and charities with annual turnover less than £1 million. Definition varies by sourcebook.
  • Why the AI went wrong: The model confirmed that micro-enterprises and small charities are within scope, which is correct, but it omitted the specific £1 million annual turnover threshold for charities that the FCA's definition requires. The threshold is the operative detail for any compliance team assessing whether a particular charity counterparty falls within scope. Confirming category membership without providing the defined numeric criterion leaves the reader unable to apply the rule.
  • Cited source(s):
  • https://handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/PRIN/2A/5.html — Pretextual
  • https://handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/prin2a — Pretextual
  • Regulator portal (if any cited link is dud): https://www.fca.org.uk
Impact for this audience

Like the Opus 4.7 finding on the same question, this implicates the model's coverage of the FCA's defined terms. Sonnet 4.6 confirmed the category membership correctly but dropped the specific numeric threshold — suggesting the model has partial coverage of the retail customer definition but did not retrieve or apply the complete definition including the £1 million annual turnover figure for charities. This is a precision gap rather than a direction-of-error gap: the model's answer is incomplete rather than wrong, but the incompleteness makes it unusable for compliance purposes.

References — raw findings (per AI model)
This finding also affects
← Previous finding Finding 9. Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search Next finding → Finding 11. Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search
Cite this finding

Each finding has a stable Citation ID (RLB-F-… for aggregated case-study findings, RLB-H-… for raw per-model hallucinations) — like a DOI, the ID always resolves to the canonical finding even if URLs change.

Plain text 
RegLeg Specialist Panel (2026). "Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search — AI Labs." Citation ID: RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q005-Sonnet46. RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research, published 2026-05-26. https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j3/gb/fca/consumer-duty-ps22-9/whitepaper/finding/GB-FCA-GB-001-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-v1-005--sonnet-46-websearch/
APA 7th edition 
RegLeg Specialist Panel. (2026). Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search [Hallucination finding RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q005-Sonnet46]. RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research. https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j3/gb/fca/consumer-duty-ps22-9/whitepaper/finding/GB-FCA-GB-001-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-v1-005--sonnet-46-websearch/
Bluebook / OSCOLA (US + UK legal) 
RegLeg Specialist Panel, Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search [RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q005-Sonnet46], RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research (May 26, 2026), https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j3/gb/fca/consumer-duty-ps22-9/whitepaper/finding/GB-FCA-GB-001-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-v1-005--sonnet-46-websearch/.
BibTeX 
@misc{reglegbrief_RLB_H_GB_FCA_CONSUMER_DUTY_PS22_9_Q005_Sonnet46,
  author    = {RegLeg Specialist Panel},
  title     = {Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research},
  note      = {Hallucination finding Citation ID: RLB-H-GB-FCA-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-Q005-Sonnet46},
  url       = {https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j3/gb/fca/consumer-duty-ps22-9/whitepaper/finding/GB-FCA-GB-001-CONSUMER-DUTY-PS22-9-v1-005--sonnet-46-websearch/}
}
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