Published on September 26, 2025 11:49 PM GMT
Introduction
AI differs from prior technologies in its unprecedented adoption speed. In the US alone, 40% of employees report using AI at work, up from 20% in 2023 two years ago. Such rapid adoption reflects how useful this technology already is for a wide range of applications, its deployability on existing digital infrastructure, and its ease of use—by just typing or speaking—without specialized training. Rapid improvement of frontier AI likely reinforces fast adoption along each of these dimensions.
Historically, new technologies took decades to reach widespread adoption. Electricity took over 30 years to reach farm households after urban electrification. The first mass-market personal computer reached early adopters in 1981, but did not reach the majority of homes in the US for another 20 years. Even the rapidly-adopted internet took around five years to hit adoption rates that AI reached in just two years.
Why is this? In short, it takes time for new technologies—even transformative ones—to diffuse throughout the economy, for consumer adoption to become less geographically concentrated, and for firms to restructure business operations to best unlock new technical capabilities. Firm adoption, first for a narrow set of tasks, then for more general purpose applications, is an important way that consequential technologies spread and have transformative economic effects.
In other words, a hallmark of early technological adoption is that it is concentrated—in both a small number of geographic regions and a small number of tasks in firms. As we document in this report, AI adoption appears to be following a similar pattern in the 21st century, albeit on shorter timelines and with greater intensity than the diffusion of technologies in the 20th century.
To study such patterns of early AI adoption, we extend the Anthropic Economic Index along two important dimensions, introducing a geographic analysis of Claude.ai conversations and a first-of-its-kind examination of enterprise API use. We show how Claude usage has evolved over time, how adoption patterns differ across regions, and—for the first time—how firms are deploying frontier AI to solve business problems.
Changing patterns of usage on Claude.ai over time
In the first chapter of this report, we identify notable changes in usage on Claude.ai over the previous eight months, occurring alongside improvements in underlying model capabilities, new product features, and a broadening of the Claude consumer base.
We find:
- Education and science usage shares are on the rise: While the use of Claude for coding continues to dominate our total sample at 36%, educational tasks surged from 9.3% to 12.4%, and scientific tasks from 6.3% to 7.2%.Users are entrusting Claude with more autonomy: “Directive” conversations, where users delegate complete tasks to Claude, jumped from 27% to 39%. We see increased program creation in coding (+4.5pp) and a reduction in debugging (-2.9pp)—suggesting that users might be able to achieve more of their goals in a single exchange.
The geography of AI adoption
For the first time, we release geographic cuts of Claude.ai usage data across 150+ countries and all U.S. states. To study diffusion patterns, we introduce the Anthropic AI Usage Index (AUI) to measure whether Claude.ai use is over- or underrepresented in an economy relative to its working age population.
We find:
- The AUI strongly correlates with income across countries: As with previous technologies, we see that AI usage is geographically concentrated. Singapore and Canada are among the highest countries in terms of usage per capita at 4.6x and 2.9x what would be expected based on their population, respectively. In contrast, emerging economies, including Indonesia at 0.36x, India at 0.27x and Nigeria at 0.2x, use Claude less.In the U.S., local economy factors shape patterns of use: DC leads per-capita usage (3.82x population share), but Utah is close behind (3.78x). We see evidence that regional usage patterns reflect distinctive features of the local economy: For example, elevated use for IT in California, for financial services in Florida, and for document editing and career assistance in DC.Leading countries have more diverse usage: Lower-adoption countries tend to see more coding usage, while high-adoption regions show diverse applications across education, science, and business. For example, coding tasks are over half of all usage in India versus roughly a third of all usage globally.High-adoption countries show less automated, more augmented use: After controlling for task mix by country, low AUI countries are more likely to delegate complete tasks (automation), while high-adoption areas tend toward greater learning and human-AI iteration (augmentation).
The uneven geography of early AI adoption raises important questions about economic convergence. Transformative technologies of the late 19th century and the early 20th centuries—widespread electrification, the internal combustion engine, indoor plumbing—not only ushered in the era of modern economic growth but accompanied a large divergence in living standards around the world.
If the productivity gains are larger for high-adoption economies, current usage patterns suggest that the benefits of AI may concentrate in already-rich regions—possibly increasing global economic inequality and reversing growth convergence seen in recent decades.
Systematic enterprise deployment of AI
In the final chapter, we present first-of-its-kind insight on a large fraction of our first-party (1P) API traffic, revealing the tasks companies and developers are using Claude to accomplish. Importantly, API users access Claude programmatically, rather than through a web user interface (as with Claude.ai). This shows how early-adopting businesses are deploying frontier AI capabilities.
We find:
- 1P API usage, while similar to Claude.ai use, differs in specialized ways: Both 1P API usage and Claude.ai usage focus heavily on coding tasks. However, 1P API usage is higher for coding and office/admin tasks, while Claude.ai usage is higher for educational and writing tasks.1P API usage is automation dominant: 77% of business uses involve automation usage patterns, compared to about 50% for Claude.ai users. This reflects the programmatic nature of API usage.Capabilities seem to matter more than cost in shaping business deployment: The most-used tasks in our API data tend to cost more than the less frequent ones. Overall, we find evidence of weak price sensitivity. Model capabilities and the economic value of feasibly automating a given task appears to play a larger role in shaping businesses’ usage patterns.Context constrains sophisticated use: Our analysis suggests that curating the right context for models will be important for high-impact deployments of AI in complex domains. This implies that for some firms costly data modernization and organizational investments to elicit contextual information may be a bottleneck for AI adoption.
Open source data to catalyze independent research
As with previous reports, we have open-sourced the underlying data to support independent research on the economic effects of AI. This comprehensive dataset includes task-level usage patterns for both Claude.ai and 1P API traffic (mapped to the O*NET taxonomy as well as bottom-up categories), collaboration mode breakdowns by task, and detailed documentation of our methodology. At present, geographic usage patterns are only available for Claude.ai traffic.
Key questions we hope this data will help others to investigate include:
- What are the local labor market consequences for workers and firms of AI usage & adoption?What determines AI adoption across countries and within the US? What can be done to ensure that the benefits of AI do not only accrue to already-rich economies?What role, if any, does cost-per-task play in shaping enterprise deployment patterns?Why are firms able to automate some tasks and not others? What implications does this have for which types of workers will experience better or worse employment prospects?
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