Anthropic Publishes the Largest Qualitative AI User Study Ever — and Used Claude to Conduct the Interviews
Nearly 81,000 people across 159 countries sat for conversational interviews with an AI about AI. The results reveal a global optimism gap: the Global South believes far more than the West.
Anthropic released what it calls the largest qualitative study of AI users ever conducted: 80,934 conversational interviews spanning 159 countries and 70 languages, all completed in a single week. The interviews weren't surveys. They were conducted by a custom-prompted version of Claude — Anthropic Interviewer — designed to hold open-ended, adaptive conversations about how people use AI, what they hope for, and what keeps them up at night. As @AnthropicAI described it, the goal was to hear from users in their own words at a scale that would be impossible with human researchers.
The headline finding: 67% of respondents view AI positively. But that number conceals a stark geographic divide. According to @AnthropicAI, optimism runs significantly higher in South America, Africa, and Asia than in Europe or the United States. This tracks with a pattern that researchers have noted for years — populations in rapidly developing economies tend to see AI as an accelerant for opportunity, while those in post-industrial societies more often perceive it as a threat to existing structures.
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