18 August 2026

Independent researchers map AI use patterns companies don't publicly share

Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies publish usage reports on their own products, but only reveal data supporting their preferred narrative, researchers say.
The AI Observatory, a new public research project, analyzed 24,521 real conversations across seven datasets to provide independent usage data that AI companies withhold.
When researchers applied Anthropic's own filtering methods to independent data, 48% of Claude conversations were hidden, including health, relationships, and harmful content.
Different AI models show distinct usage patterns: Grok concentrated misinformation, Anthropic's Claude dominated coding tasks, while Gemini saw more roleplay and social uses.
The independent dataset contains 85,633 conversation turns, far smaller than the 1-1.5 million conversations AI companies analyze privately, limiting researchers' ability to assess real harms.