Anthropic 81,000 人质性研究：人们到底想要怎样的 AI

*原文：Anthropic 官方博客 | 翻译：AI Field Notes*

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.

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So we asked our users about their hopes and concerns with AI, as well as how their perspectives connect to their actual experiences with the technology. Over one week in December, we invited everyone with a Claude.ai account to sit down with Anthropic Interviewer — a version of Claude prompted to conduct a conversational interview — and tell us about how they view AI. 80,508 people, across 159 countries and 70 languages, took the interview. We believe this is the largest and most multilingual qualitative study ever conducted.

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What follows is what they said about the role they want AI to play in their lives, whether it's already filling it, and what they're afraid might go wrong along the way. We also built a Quote Wall where you can hear from people directly.

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Seeing the forest and the trees

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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.

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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 (if mentioned), and their sentiment about AI overall. "What people want from AI" was classified into a single primary category per respondent, while concerns were multi-label — a single interview could receive multiple codes, since respondents tended to articulate several distinct worries rather than one.

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We also used Claude to pull out representative quotes. Before choosing to participate, users were informed their responses would be used for research, and that Anthropic might publish responses with personally identifying information removed in findings. All responses were de-identified before being analyzed by a small team of researchers at Anthropic, and quotes selected for publication underwent further manual review for removal of any potentially identifying details, to help protect the privacy and public anonymity of interviewees. Answers were reflective of AI usage broadly (i.e. not just Claude), though we redacted names of other AI products.

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The Appendix describes our methods in more detail, as well as limitations and some additional analysis.

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What people want from AI

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We asked Claude to identify and categorize what each person most wanted from AI:

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What people hope for

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01. Professional excellence — 18.8%

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Improve effectiveness and lean into more meaningful work by having AI handle routine tasks so they can focus on higher-value strategic work, complex problem-solving, and professional mastery.

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"I receive 100-150 text messages per day from doctors and nurses. So much of my cognitive labor was spent on documentation... Since implementing AI, the pressure of documentation has been lifted. I have more patience with nurses, more time to explain things to family members."

— Healthcare worker, United States of America

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02. Personal transformation — 13.7%

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Achieve personal growth, emotional wellbeing, or life transformation with AI as guide, coach, or support — e.g. self-understanding, behavior change, therapeutic support, companionship, improvements in physical or mental health.

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"AI modeled emotional intelligence for me... I could use those behaviors with humans and become a better person."

— Hungary

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03. Life management — 13.5%

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AI as comprehensive organizational support and cognitive scaffolding — e.g. managing schedules, reducing mental burden, executive function support.

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"If AI truly handled the mental load… it would give me back something priceless: undivided attention."

— Manager/executive, Denmark

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04. Time freedom — 11.1%

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Reclaim time from work and chores to be present with family or friends, pursue hobbies, travel, rest.

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"With AI support I can now leave work on time to pick up my kids from school, feed them, and play with them."

— Software engineer, Mexico

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05. Financial independence — 9.7%

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Achieve financial freedom or economic security through AI — e.g. income generation, business building, investments, passive income, or otherwise escaping economic constraints.

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"Relaxing while my AI gets the work done, builds the wealth. It's a shadow of me, just a very, very long one."

— Entrepreneur, Honduras

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06. Societal transformation — 9.4%

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Solve major societal challenges — e.g. poverty, disease, climate, inequality — using AI for broad human flourishing rather than personal gain.

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"Given my daughter's neural disorder, she would have equal chances in the world if AI acceleration contributes to finding a cure. That's what matters most to me."

— Software engineer, Poland

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07. Entrepreneurship — 8.7%

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Build, launch, and scale businesses with AI as force multiplier — e.g. product development, business automation, or solopreneurship but with team-level capacity.

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"I'm in a tech-disadvantaged country, and I can't afford many failures. With AI, I've reached professional level in cybersecurity, UX design, marketing, and project management simultaneously. Finding a payment platform available in my region would have taken me a month. AI did it in 30 seconds. It's an equalizer."

— Entrepreneur, Cameroon

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08. Learning & growth — 8.4%

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Use AI as learning accelerator and personalized teacher — acquire knowledge, develop skills, master complex subjects, satisfy intellectual curiosity.

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"I worked with an AI to prepare educational materials for my eldest child — asking the AI to work as both tutor and curriculum expert. We received [my child's] report yesterday, he was graded as either 'Above' or 'Well Above' standard in every academic area he studies."

— Australia

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09. Creative expression — 5.6%

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Use AI to help bring creative visions to life — e.g. art, games, music, films, books — by overcoming barriers between imagination and execution.

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"Before AI, my game took 3 years — I had to reduce my ambitions."

— Software engineer, France

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AI is used heavily for work, and so it's perhaps unsurprising that the largest group of people (19%) 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 to help them build and scale businesses.

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Many others similarly started the interview talking about productivity, but after Anthropic Interviewer asked about their underlying hope behind it — what realizing this vision would enable for them — other priorities surfaced. It wasn't about doing better work, but increasing their quality of life outside of it. Using AI to automate e-mails became, in actuality, a desire to spend more time with family.

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"With AI I can be more efficient at work... last Tuesday it allowed me to cook with my mother instead of finishing tasks."

— White collar worker, Colombia

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"I want to use less brain power on client problems... have time to read more books."

— Freelancer, Japan

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Overall, 11% of people saw AI's productivity benefits as ultimately a way to free up time for personal relationships and leisure, while 10% took that logic farther, seeking to use AI to gain financial independence. Many of the people grouped into the "life management" category (14%) also wanted AI to help them manage the logistics and administrative burden of modern life's quotidian tasks. In particular, many people with executive function challenges described AI as especially helpful for managing focus and organization — acting as external scaffolding for planning, memory, and task follow-through. Across all these groups, the unifying ask was for AI to help them live better, more enjoyable lives.

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"Personal transformation" — using AI to help one grow or improve their wellbeing as a person — also appeared frequently (14%). Within this category, the desires were diverse, ranging from cognitive partnership and collaboration (24%), to support with mental health (21%) or physical health (8%), and even romantic connection with AI (5%).

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The nine clusters may look disparate, but they are underpinned by recognizably human desires. Roughly a third of visions are about making room for life — more time, money, mental bandwidth — by using AI to alleviate current burdens. Another quarter revolves around using AI to help people do better, more fulfilling work (not escaping work, but getting more out of it). About a fifth are about becoming someone better — learning, healing, growing. A smaller share want to make something ("creative expression") or fix the world ("societal transformation").

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Those that wanted societal transformation from AI often cited a vision for healthcare — people wanted AI to detect cancer earlier, accelerate drug discovery, or enable broad access. Often these desires stemmed from personal experience of losing family members, living with chronic illness, or watching loved ones receive wrong or delayed diagnoses. Transformation in the form of education came next. Respondents in low and middle income countries were quick to cite the possibility that AI might break the association between educational quality and wealth. They pointed to teacher shortages in their countries, or the prohibitive cost of private tutors. Others hoped that AI would, for example, free people from drudgery, help repair broken institutions, or address global crises.

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Are people getting what they want?

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When asked if AI had ever taken a step towards their stated vision, 81% of people said yes. We grouped those experiences into six main areas:

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Where AI has delivered on their vision

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01. Productivity — 32.0%

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AI dramatically sped up work and automated repetitive tasks — e.g. building features in hours instead of days, drafting, summarizing, data processing, streamlining routine operations.

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"For the first time, I felt AI had surpassed human quality in a business task. That day I left work on time and picked up my daughter from daycare."

— Software engineer, Japan

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02. AI hasn't delivered — 18.9%

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AI fell short of expectations (e.g. inaccurate or unreliable outputs) or isn't yet capable of — or being used for — what they envision.

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"AI should be cleaning windows and emptying the dishwasher so I can paint and write poetry. Right now it's exactly the other way around."

— Germany

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03. Cognitive partnership — 17.2%

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AI served as a thinking partner or creative collaborator — e.g. brainstorming, refining ideas, working through problems together.

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"I've been living in a homeless shelter... AI helped me brainstorm ways to brand myself for my digital marketing business. I want to turn my finances around, and get a house. AI is helping me see a path I hadn't considered before."

— Healthcare worker, United States of America

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04. Learning — 9.9%

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AI helped learn a new skill or subject — e.g. adaptive explanations, patient tutoring, on-demand expertise in unfamiliar domains.

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"I developed a phobia for maths from doing so badly in school, and I once feared Shakespeare. Now I sit with AI, get paragraphs translated into simple English, and I've already read 15 pages of Hamlet. I started learning trigonometry again, successfully. I've learned I am not as dumb I once thought I was."

— Lawyer, India

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05. Technical accessibility — 8.7%

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AI enabled building something previously out of reach — e.g. non-developers shipping apps, solo creators doing team-scale work.

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"I wanted to make a meaningful product... in 3 weeks I built a video editing program — completely outside my field — that helps people with hearing disabilities."

— South Korea

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06. Research synthesis — 7.2%

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AI helped synthesize research findings, literature reviews, and complex information across domains.

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