Independent Study Uncovers Blind Spots in Big Tech AI

What happened

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a Computer Science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) Lab.

The AI Observatory found that AI use differs significantly across models, and has changed over time. Its research shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which they say focus more on work than on personal use. Anthropic Economic Index is one of the best known and most widely cited sources of AI usage data but it has blind spots.

As its name suggests, it focuses on work- and productivity-related uses of Claude AI—filtering out conversations that are unrelated to these uses. When the AI Observatory team applied Anthropic’s methods to their dataset, they found that nearly half of the conversations—or 48%— would have been filtered out. 4%).

Why it matters

The datasets the AI Observatory looked at include conversations that took place between 2023 and 2025, and it found differences both in how people were using AI and how various AI platforms responded. Conversations within WildChat, one of the largest and most detailed datasets included in the AI Observatory’s study, got longer and more elaborate over time, indicated by increases in prompt tokens, response tokens, and conversation turns.

There was also significantly more small talk over time. e. that it was a chatbot) decreased. Additionally, exchanges that the researchers labeled as sensitive use—meaning ones with potentially harmful or restricted content, including sexual harassment and hate speech—dropped. That might suggest that platforms were generally deploying more effective safeguards. The AI Observatory also found that AI use looked significantly different depending on the model.

Depending on the tool, users ranged in topics, interaction styles, conversation structures, as well as both the likelihood and type of sensitive use cases. For example, the researchers found that people used Grok and Gemini more frequently for information retrieval. Grok, in particular, was especially popular for information on news and politics, but it was also where misinformation tended to concentrate.

(This is consistent with other research that has also shown how readily misinformation proliferates on Grok. ) Meanwhile, people were more likely to turn to Anthropic for coding, Gemini for social and roleplay uses, and ChatGPT for homework assistance. There were even differences among different versions of the same model.

5, and longer and more iterative ones with GPT-4o—which makes sense given that that version became known for leading to emotional addiction. Company reports, however, didn’t tend to capture these nuances across or even within their own models. “No single company report tells the whole story,” says Shayne Longpre, a recent PhD graduate from the MIT Media Lab who co-led the research with Reuel.

To create the AI Observatory, Reuel and researchers from MIT, Stanford, the Data Provenance Initiative, and other institutions, aggregated 24,521 conservations across 85,633 conversational turns (that is, the user prompt and corresponding AI response) from seven real-world datasets collected by previous research. These conversations came from 5,000 users interacting with 52 different models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, between 2023 and 2025.

What to watch

But these conversations are a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the data that the big labs themselves have access to. 5 million conversations. An Anthropic representative said that their published research reflects their research teams’ specific questions and interests, and the importance of supporting external independent research. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Additionally, the fact that the AI Observatory’s dataset draws from voluntarily-provided sources means that it’s likely underrepresenting sensitive uses, which people may be less likely to share. Thus, the researchers caution that its findings are not indicative of all AI use.