18 August 2026

Independent researchers publish first broad analysis of real AI conversations

Stanford PhD candidate Anka Reuel and colleagues created the AI Observatory, a public platform analyzing 24,521 real conversations from seven datasets to provide independent insight into how people actually use AI.
When researchers applied Anthropic's filtering methods to their dataset, 48% of conversations would have been excluded, compared to Anthropic's own analysis which filtered out far fewer conversations involving health, relationships, adult topics, and harassment.
Different AI models show distinct usage patterns: Grok and Gemini dominated information retrieval, Claude for coding, Gemini for roleplay, and ChatGPT for homework, patterns that individual company reports typically miss.