Results from the first Anthropic Public Record

We’re conducting a new survey series, Anthropic Public Record, to understand how the public thinks and feels about AI, and presenting a snapshot of the results from the first wave, fielded in November and December of 2025 with nearly 52,000 Americans.

Strikingly, on most questions, AI did not heavily divide Americans along typical partisan, geographic, or educational lines. In general, there was broad consensus across topics: Americans are eager to realize AI’s promised benefits but fear the disruption it may bring, and they want accountability from the companies building it. To the extent we saw disagreement, it was largely only in the intensity of people's views.

This research builds on other work underway at Anthropic to understand how people use Claude and think about AI development. We recently conducted a global qualitative study of 81,000 Claude users through Anthropic Interviewer , our tool for conducting in-depth interviews at scale. We also regularly release data from the Anthropic Economic Index , which draws on anonymized Claude usage data to show how people around the world are employing AI. The Anthropic Public Record survey marks the first time we’ve spoken to the general public, allowing us to reach non-users of AI and better understand how attitudes differ across demographic lines.

Weighting: Data are weighted to be representative of the US resident population age 16 and over on state, age, gender, education, and race/ethnicity. Weights are normalized to the achieved sample size (mean 1.00, sum 51,993).

The most common harms tended to be near-term and concrete: job loss, cognitive dependency, misinformation, criminal use, and surveillance. Each of these fears also predates AI, having precedent in an earlier technology—for example, automation causing job loss, smartphones fostering dependency, and social media spreading misinformation. In general, Americans tended to be more concerned with the misuse of AI than AI misalignment, citing criminal use, surveillance, and terrorism more frequently than, for example, AI “going rogue”.

Overall assessment of AI capabilities was fairly high. At the high end, 75% of Americans said AI was as good or better than humans on research. At the low end, 44% said AI was as good or better in service and support.

We then asked about eight specific domains, and how heavily the government should be involved in each. Only two—privacy and child safety—draw outright majority support for more than a minimal role. National security, meanwhile, has the narrowest partisan gap of any domain, just three points between Democrats and Republicans.

Integrated users were more trusting of every institution we asked about, including AI companies—and were markedly less inclined to say AI development should be slowed or stopped. However, they also support government involvement on AI at essentially the national rate (74% versus 71%), and across the eight specific governance domains we tested, their preferences are nearly indistinguishable from the public's.

The Anthropic Public Record will be repeated regularly, evolving in scope as new topics become more salient, and allowing us to track how the public’s attitudes towards AI change as model capabilities advance and adoption deepens. In the future, we plan to expand outside the US.

We conducted a nationally representative online survey in November and December of 2025 of 51,993 Americans, sourced from YouGov and weighted to US Census benchmarks. State samples range from n=232 (Alaska) to n=1,902 (New York), with state-level margins of error between ±2.6 and ±9.1 percentage points. More details on the methodology are available in the Appendix.

We asked Americans to choose their top three hopes for AI from a list of 17. Curing disease topped the list, with 48% of respondents putting it in their top three, 12 percentage points ahead of the second most commonly selected item, helping people with disabilities, at 36%. Items like therapy and reducing loneliness—or hopes that AI might substitute for human contact—were the lowest ranked of the options presented.