What 81,000 people want from AI

What 81,000 people want from AI

Last December, tens of thousands of Claude users around the world had a conversation with our AI interviewer to share how they use AI, what they dream it could make possible, and what they fear it might do.

We heard from people across 159 countries in 70 languages. We believe this is the largest and most multilingual qualitative study ever conducted.

Public conversation about AI often centers on abstract projections of its risks and benefits. What's largely missing is a vision for what “AI going well” means, grounded in the concrete aspirations of people around the world who already use AI and have begun developing a sense of what it might do for them.

Seeing the forest and the trees

Anthropic Interviewer asked each interviewee a set list of questions about what they want and don’t want from AI, then adapted follow-up questions based on responses. This approach bridges the typical tradeoff in qualitative research between depth and volume, and allows us to collect rich, open-ended interviews at a very large scale.

To make sense of this huge amount of information, we built Claude-powered classifiers that categorized each conversation across a range of dimensions—what people want from AI, whether they’re getting what they want, what they fear, what they do for a living, and their sentiment about AI overall.

What people want from AI

We asked Claude to identify and categorize what each person most wanted from AI. The findings revealed several key human desires:

Professional Excellence (19%)

AI is used heavily for work, and the largest group of people sought “professional excellence”—wanting AI to handle mundane tasks so they can focus on strategic, higher-level problems. Another 9% envisioned AI as an entrepreneurial partner.

Quality of Life (11%)

Many users saw AI’s productivity benefits as a way to free up time for personal relationships and leisure. Using AI to automate emails became, in actuality, a desire to spend more time with family or engage in hobbies.

Life Management (14%)

This group wanted AI to help manage the logistics and administrative burden of modern life. In particular, many people with executive function challenges described AI as especially helpful for managing focus and organization.

Personal Transformation (14%)

This includes using AI for personal growth, mental health support (21% of this category), or physical health (8%).

Societal Transformation

Those seeking societal transformation often cited healthcare—detecting cancer earlier or accelerating drug discovery. In low and middle-income countries, respondents highlighted the possibility of AI breaking the link between educational quality and wealth, addressing teacher shortages and high costs of tutoring.

Are people getting what they want?

When asked if AI had ever taken a step towards their stated vision, 81% of people said yes.

The dominant success story was in productivity (32%), specifically technical acceleration. Developers described significant gains, such as cutting a 173-day process down to just 3 days, allowing for a better work-life balance. Another key area was technical accessibility (9%), where AI helps people break through technical barriers they previously couldn't overcome.