// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
We still don’t know how people are really using AI
But a new study shows that work use cases make up less of the picture than AI companies claim.
AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say.
“There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) Lab.
Reuel is co-lead of a new research project, called the AI Observatory, that aims to fill in the gap. It’s a public platform that aggregated and analyzed real AI conversations with popular models like Claude and Gemini that were collected with users’ consent through seven existing datasets. The intent is to provide independent sources of information that can help researchers and policymakers assess how people are using generative AI. Stakeholders are currently making highly consequential decisions about AI’s benefits and risks based on very limited data, says Reuel.
The AI Observatory found that AI use differs significantly across models and has changed over time. Its research shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which they say focus more on work than on personal use.
The Anthropic Economic Index is one of the best-known and most widely cited sources of AI usage data, but it has blind spots. As its name suggests, it focuses on work- and productivity-related uses of Claude AI—filtering out conversations that are unrelated to these uses.
When the AI Observatory researchers applied Anthropic’s methods to their dataset, they found that nearly half the conversations—48%—would have been filtered out. Those non-work-related conversations were more likely to involve health and relationships (44.2% versus 31.2% in Anthropic’s analysis), adult or illicit topics (7.9% versus 2.1%), harassment and hate (27.5% versus 5.66%), and sexual content (16.7% versus 2.4%). (OpenAI’s 2025 report on ChatGPT, similarly, found that only 30% of consumer use was related to work.)
Anthropic has released separate blog posts on how people use Claude for support or companionship, and even to generate CSAM, “but having [the AI Observatory’s] bird’s-eye-view analysis rather than sectioned off into a separate report” helps researchers understand the different uses more consistently, says David Widder, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who researches how people interact with AI systems and is not involved with the AI Observatory.
The datasets the AI Observatory looked at include conversations that took place between 2023 and 2025, and it found differences both in how people were using AI and how various AI platforms responded.
Conversations within WildChat, one of the largest and most detailed datasets included in the AI Observatory’s study, got longer and more elaborate over time, indicated by growing numbers of prompt tokens, response tokens, and conversation turns.