18 August 2026

Stanford researchers publish independent analysis of how people use AI

Stanford PhD candidate Anka Reuel and collaborators from MIT and other institutions created the AI Observatory, a public platform analyzing 24,521 real conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok collected between 2023 and 2025 with user consent.
AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI publish their own usage reports based on millions of conversations, but researchers say these reports only show data the companies choose to release, leaving major blind spots.
When the Observatory applied Anthropic's methodology to its dataset, nearly half of conversations were filtered out as non-work-related, including 44% discussing health and relationships versus 31% in Anthropic's published analysis.
Different AI models show dramatically different usage patterns: people use Grok and Gemini mainly for information retrieval, Claude for coding, ChatGPT for homework, and Gemini for social roleplay, patterns company reports do not consistently capture.
The Observatory's dataset is much smaller than company datasets and drawn from volunteers, so it likely underrepresents sensitive uses, but researchers say independent access to data is essential for policymakers making consequential decisions about AI.