Anthropic 2026-03-20-2
What 81,000 People Want from AI
Anthropic's 80K-user qualitative study is corporate research performing as social science, and the method is more important than the findings. The top-line numbers (81% say AI delivered on their vision) collapse under selection bias: active Claude users who opted into an interview about AI. The real buried signal is the co-occurrence data: users who value AI emotional support are 3x more likely to also fear dependency on it. Benefits and harms aren't opposing camps; they're tensions within the same person. That finding has product design implications that the sentiment percentages never will.