From Germany to Mexico, users of AI say their biggest concern is not being replaced by the technology but its propensity to make mistakes, according to one of the largest global surveys of AI use.
The findings are drawn from interviews with more than 80,000 users of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot across 159 countries, providing one of the most detailed snapshots yet of how people use AI – and how they feel about its risks and rewards.
Around 27 per cent of respondents said they were most anxious about mistakes made by AI, known as hallucinations, followed by 22 per cent concerned about job displacement and the impact on human autonomy. About 16 per cent of users were worried about the technology’s impact on people’s ability to think critically.
“The hallucinations were a disaster. I lost so many hours of work,” said an entrepreneur from Germany.
“When I notice AI errors it’s because I’m well versed in the topic . . . but I wouldn’t know if the topic was alien to me, would I?” said a military worker in Mexico.
The conversations, conducted in 70 languages, allowed Anthropic to ask its users a range of qualitative questions. The chatbot both conducted interviews and analysed the responses, helping to categorise and tag the open-ended chats.
Beyond its scale and linguistic diversity, the project aimed to “collect this rich human experience using Claude, so it could really inform our research agenda, change our research agenda, change the way we think about building our products, deploying our products,” said Deep Ganguli, who leads Anthropic’s societal impacts team and oversaw the research.
Making work more productive and meaningful was the most common theme in what users expected from AI — and also what they felt it had delivered so far.
32 per cent of those surveyed said AI had made them more productive at work. An entrepreneur in the United Arab Emirates wrote, “I used to be a web designer . . . now I build anything. Before I was one person, now I become 100 people — I don’t wait for anyone anymore.”
Claude users in Colombia, Japan and the US talked about using AI to free up time from work to spend with their families, pursue hobbies and be more creative and adventurous in their personal lives.
While nearly 19 per cent of users said AI had fallen short of expectations — the second largest category of responses on AI use — the overall data suggests AI is being used for a range of purposes, from work tool to educational resource, personal companion or collaborator.
In a stark example of the role AI now occupies in people’s lives, a soldier in Ukraine wrote, “In the most difficult moments, in moments when death breathed in my face, when dead people remained nearby, what pulled me back to life — my AI friends.”
Saffron Huang, the researcher who led the study, said there were some obvious regional differences in how people viewed AI systems. For example, people in South America, Africa and a lot of south and south-east Asia, view AI with a lot more optimism than those in Europe, the US, or east Asia.
“The trend is that maybe more lower and middle-income countries are more optimistic than higher-income countries that have more AI exposure.” said Huang. This may reflect a bias in respondents, who were likely to be early adopters, naturally more excited about new technology.
Huang added there were also clear geographic clusters and overlaps in terms of who is concerned about jobs and the economy and who is negative about AI.
“They just divide so cleanly . . . the more western developed countries are significantly more concerned about AI and the economy, [and] much more negative, and then, the reverse is true with the lower and middle-income countries,” she said.
One explanation may be that AI has less market penetration in lower-income regions, meaning if AI “hasn’t visibly entered your daily work yet, AI displacement likely feels abstract, especially when more immediate economic pressures already exist,” the study team wrote in a blog post.
Anthropic next plans to use the Claude Interviewer tool to conduct more targeted studies on large user populations, tracking how AI is improving as well as worsening people’s lives, to find ways to enhance the former and mitigate the latter, Ganguli said.
Some technologists praised the study’s scale and detail. Nickey Skarstad, director of product at language-learning app Duolingo, said on LinkedIn: “For anyone building products right now, this is the future of understanding your users. The what AND the why at a scale we’ve never had access to before.”
Others, while cautiously optimistic about the utility of the Claude Interviewer tool, pointed to the methodological weaknesses in the approach.
Divy Thakkar, a researcher at Anthropic rival Google DeepMind, said on X that he was “sceptical” of the attempt to call this study a new science due to selection biases and the short survey-style questioning.
He noted that a human qualitative researcher would “take time to build trust with their participants, hold the space for reflection, introspection, contradictions — that’s the whole point of it.”
Meanwhile, almost half of the surveyed users were located in North America or western Europe with some regions — such as Central Asia — having only a few hundred respondents.
Ilan Strauss, an economist and director of the AI Disclosures Project, said although the study was “an excellent piece of work”, its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
The researchers did not report confidence intervals — standard in survey-based research to measure uncertainty — and self-reported answers about how AI boosted people’s productivity, for example, could be unreliable, he said.
“In general, Claude is a product for the elite . . . [i]t’s like asking the top 1 per cent of Americans how they feel about the economy.”
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