Exclusive: Anthropic's "index" tracks AI economy
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Today's AI users employ the technology more as a collaborator than as an autonomous helper, according to a new study of real-world AI use by Anthropic, shared exclusively with Axios.
Why it matters: The new Anthropic Economic Index is an ambitious effort to track the impact of AI adoption by directly analyzing anonymized data on how people are using Claude, Anthropic's chatbot.
The big picture: Today, only AI providers have a direct view of what people are actually doing with their tools. The more information AI makers share with the world, the better we'll be able to understand how the new technology is changing our lives.
- Anthropic said in a blog post that the study provides "the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy."
- "We're in an AI revolution in society. Society needs information about what that is doing to the world, and we see this as a way to contribute data there," Jack Clark, an Anthropic co-founder who is the firm's head of policy, told Axios.
What they found: "AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks," Anthropic reports.
- The distinctions "between you fully delegating tasks to a language model — versus, like, batting the ball back and forth — are subtle and emerging right now," Clark says.
- AI adoption was widest among workers in "computer and mathematical" fields — chiefly, software engineering. 37.2% of queries sent to Claude were in this category, per Anthropic. (That could reflect Claude's popularity among programmers.)
- The next-largest category was "arts, design, sports, entertainment, and media" (10.3% of queries), which Anthropic said "mainly reflected people using Claude for … writing and editing."
How it works: Anthropic uses its own tool called Clio to collect and analyze Claude usage data while preserving users' privacy.
- "It's a sample of around a million conversations over a seven-day period that people are having with Claude AI, and we filter that sample down to only conversations that are actually about work," Deep Ganguli, leader of Anthropic's societal impacts team, told Axios.
What's next: Anthropic plans to run follow-ups every six months to track changes in AI use over time.
- "A challenge in AI is you don't know the full scope of the capabilities of the systems that are being released," Clark says. "It's very different to, you know, cars, where you know how fast the car is that you're bringing out."
Anthropic is publishing all its data so external researchers can review and use it. "We'd love more eyes on this problem," Ganguli says.
- Anthropic is also hoping other companies will follow its lead and release similar information.
- "We want to figure out how the AI industry should make itself legible to the rest of the world," Clark adds. "Some of that comes through statements that companies make, but some of it comes through data."
