Opening article
This report introduces new metrics of AI usage to provide a rich portrait of interactions with Claude in November 2025, just prior to the release of Opus 4.5.
This report introduces new metrics of AI usage to provide a rich portrait of interactions with Claude in November 2025, just prior to the release of Opus 4.5. These “primitives”—simple, foundational measures of how Claude is used, which we generate by asking Claude specific questions about anonymized Claude.ai and first-party (1P) API transcripts—cover five dimensions relevant to AI’s economic impact: user and AI skills, how complex tasks are, the degree of autonomy afforded to Claude, how successful Claude is, and whether Claude is used for personal, educational, or work purposes.
The results reveal striking geographic variation, real-world estimates of AI task horizons, and a basis for revised assessments of Claude's macroeconomic impact.
The data we release alongside this report are the most comprehensive to date, covering five new dimensions of AI use, consumer and firm use, and country and region breakdowns for Claude.ai.
The share of usage on Claude.ai for Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media tasks increased between August and November 2025 as Claude was used in a growing share of conversations for writing tasks, primarily copyediting and the writing and refinement of fictional pieces. This jump in the prevalence of design- and writing-related tasks reversed a steady decline across earlier reports. For both Claude.ai and API customers, there was a drop in the share of conversations/transcripts where Claude was used for Life, Physical, and Social Science-related tasks.
Perhaps the most notable development for API customers was the increase in the share of transcripts associated with Office and Administrative Support related tasks, which rose 3pp in August to 13% in November 2025. Because API use is automation-dominant, this suggests that businesses are increasingly using Claude to automate routine back-office workflows such as email management, document processing, customer relationship management, and scheduling. 4
In the first chapter, we revisit findings from our previous Economic Index report published in September 2025. We find:
While substantial concentration remains, since our last report Claude usage has become noticeably more evenly distributed across US states. If sustained, usage per capita would be equalized across the country in 2-5 years.
In the second chapter we discuss the motivation for and introduce our new economic primitives, including how they were selected and operationalized, and their limitations. We additionally present evidence that our primitives capture directionally accurate aspects of underlying usage patterns as compared to external benchmarks. In chapters three and four we use these primitives to further investigate implications for adoption and productivity. We find:
This report introduces new metrics of AI usage to provide a rich portrait of interactions with Claude in November 2025, just prior to the release of Opus 4.5 Reported by Anthropic Research on January 15, 2026.