We still don’t know how people are really using AI

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 Observatory’s intent is to provide independent sources of information for researchers and policymakers to 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.  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 team applied Anthropic’s methods to their dataset, they found that nearly half of the conversations—or 48%— would have been filtered out. Those non-work-related conversations that were filtered out were more likely to include 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 use, 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 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 UT-Austin’s School of Information, 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 increases in prompt tokens, response tokens, and conversation turns.  There was also significantly more small talk over time. That suggests that AI companionship was increasing; meanwhile the AI assistants’ self-disclosure (i.e. that it was a chatbot) decreased.  Additionally, exchanges that the researchers labeled as sensitive use—meaning ones with potentially harmful or restricted content, including sexual harassment and hate speech—dropped. That might suggest that platforms were generally deploying more effective safeguards.  The AI Observatory also found that AI use looked significantly different depending on the model. Depending on the tool, users ranged in topics, interaction styles, conversation structures, as well as both the likelihood and type of sensitive use cases.  For example, the researchers found that people used Grok and Gemini more frequently for information retrieval. Grok, in particular, was especially popular for information on news and politics, but it was also where misinformation tended to concentrate. (This is consistent with other research that has also shown how readily misinformation proliferates on Grok. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.)  Meanwhile, people were more likely to turn to Anthropic for coding, Gemini for social and roleplay uses, and ChatGPT for homework assistance.  There were even differences among different versions of the same model. Researchers found that people had shorter conversations with ChatGPT when it was powered by GPT-3.5, and longer and more iterative ones with GPT-4o—which makes sense given that that version became known for leading to emotional addiction.  Company reports, however, didn’t tend to capture these nuances across or even within their own models. “No single company report tells the whole story,” says Shayne Longpre, a recent PhD graduate from the MIT Media Lab who co-led the research with Reuel.  To create the AI Observatory, Reuel and researchers from MIT, Stanford, the Data Provenance Initiative, and other institutions, aggregated 24,521 conservations across 85,633 conversational turns (that is, the user prompt and corresponding AI response) from seven real-world datasets collected by previous research.