How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship

We spend a lot of time studying Claude's IQ—its capabilities on tests of coding, reasoning, general knowledge, and more. But what about its EQ ? That is, what about Claude’s emotional intelligence?

The IQ/EQ question is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it raises a serious point. People increasingly turn to AI models as on-demand coaches, advisors, counselors, and even partners in romantic roleplay. This means we need to learn more about their affective impacts—how they shape people's emotional experiences and well-being.

Researching the affective uses of AI is interesting in and of itself. From Blade Runner to Her , emotional relationships between humans and machines have been a mainstay of science fiction—but it’s also important for Anthropic’s safety mission . The emotional impacts of AI can be positive : having a highly intelligent, understanding assistant in your pocket can improve your mood and life in all sorts of ways. But AIs have in some cases demonstrated troubling behaviors, like encouraging unhealthy attachment , violating personal boundaries , and enabling delusional thinking . We also want to avoid situations where AIs, whether through their training or through the business incentives of their creators, exploit users’ emotions to increase engagement or revenue at the expense of human well-being.

A key concern about affective AI is whether interactions might spiral into negative feedback loops, potentially reinforcing harmful emotional states. We do not directly study real-world outcomes here, but we can explore changes in the overall emotional sentiment over the course of conversations (we provide our full methodology for evaluating sentiment in the Appendix).

Yet important questions remain, especially in the context of ever-increasing model intelligence. For example, if AI provides endless empathy with minimal pushback, how does this reshape people's expectations for real-world relationships? Claude can engage with people in impressively authentic ways, but an AI isn't the same as a human: Claude doesn't get tired or distracted, or have bad days. What are the advantages of this dynamic—and what are the risks? How do "power users", who have longer and deeper conversations with Claude and may think of it more as a companion than an AI assistant, engage with it for emotional support?

Although Claude is not designed for emotional support and connection, in this post we provide early large-scale insight into the affective use of Claude.ai. We define affective conversations as those where people engage directly with Claude in dynamic, personal exchanges motivated by emotional or psychological needs such as seeking interpersonal advice, coaching, psychotherapy/counseling, companionship, or sexual/romantic roleplay (for complete definitions, please see the Appendix). Importantly, we do not examine AI reinforcement of delusions or conspiracy theories—a critical area for separate study—nor extreme usage patterns. Through this research, our goal is to understand the typical ways people turn to Claude for emotional and personal needs. Since Claude.ai is available to users 18 and older, these findings reflect adult usage patterns.

Given the extremely low prevalence of romantic and sexual roleplay conversations (less than 0.1%), we exclude roleplay from the remainder of our analysis. While we believe this remains an important area for research—particularly on platforms designed for such use—the minimal data in our sample doesn't support rigorous analysis of these patterns.

Pushback occurs infrequently in supportive contexts: Less than 10% of companionship, counseling, interpersonal advice, or coaching conversations involve resistance. This approach carries both benefits and risks. On one hand, the low resistance allows people to discuss sensitive topics without fear of judgment or being shut down, potentially reducing stigma around mental health conversations. On the other hand, this could contribute to concerns about AI providing "endless empathy," where people might become accustomed to unconditional support that human relationships rarely provide.

Given the personal nature of affective conversations, protecting privacy was central to our methodology. We used Clio , our automated analysis tool that enables privacy-preserving insights into Claude usage. Clio uses multiple layers of anonymization and aggregation to ensure individual conversations remain private while revealing broader patterns.

We began with approximately 4.5 million conversations from Claude.ai Free and Pro accounts. To identify affective use, we first excluded conversations focused on content creation tasks (such as writing stories, blog posts, or fictional dialogues), which our previous research found to be a major use case. We removed these conversations because they represent Claude being used as a tool rather than as an interactive conversational partner. We then retained only conversations classified as affective, and among roleplay conversations, kept only those with at least four human messages (shorter exchanges don't constitute meaningful interactive roleplay). Our final privacy-preserving analysis reflects 131,484 affective conversations.

We validated our classification approach using Feedback data from users who explicitly opted in to sharing. Our complete methods, including definitions, prompts, and validation results, are detailed in the Appendix.