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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Fridays going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates).

In December 2025, Anthropic used a version of Claude called “Anthropic Interviewer” to interview 80,508 people representing 159 countries and 70 languages, gauging their “hopes and concerns” about AI and “how their perspectives connect to their actual experiences with the technology.” The company’s findings have been summed up in the article “What 81,000 people want from AI,” published just last week on their website. Read on below to learn about some of the main takeaways of the study.

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First, people were asked what they most wanted from AI, with the top responses largely representing a blend of professional and personal desires:

Following up on these hopes, respondents were asked whether AI has lived up to their desires. Collectively, a vast majority of respondents (~81%) answered in the affirmative, for a range of different reasons, including productive, cognitive partnership, and learning.

Next, interviewees were asked about the concerns they had with AI. Here a wider range of concerns were reported compared to their desires. Concerns ranged from the behavior of the tools (unreliability, sycophancy), broader societal implications (jobs & economy, governance, misinformation), and personal matters (cognitive atrophy, meaning and creativity, wellbeing and dependency).

Perhaps the most significant finding of the study was the isolation of a number of recurring tensions between competing benefits and harms of using AI. This dual nature was referred to by the authors as the “light and shade” of AI: “the same capabilities that lead to benefits also produce harms.” Five such tensions, as well as the extent to which respondents expect or have seen the competing benefits and harms, are given below:

There’s much more to the study than can be covered here, including a deep level of analysis of each of the findings discussed above, a copious amount of quotes from interviewees supporting each of the response categories for each question, and a thorough examination of how perspectives vary from across the world, specifically highlighting how AI’s benefits and harms are perceived are distributed from region to region.

Antrhopic’s concluding words are informative: “AI poses both opportunities and risks. This is true—but also, at this point, a cliché. One of our goals for this research is to offer a complement to the abstractions we all tend to use in speaking about AI; to capture the texture that more vividly renders exactly how we are already experiencing these opportunities and risks worldwide.”

If you’re interested in determining the extent to which Anthropic achieved these goals, we encourage you to take a look at the study for yourself.