Anthropic has launched a new survey series called the Anthropic Public Record, designed to gauge how the general public thinks and feels about AI. The first wave was conducted in November and December 2025 with nearly 52,000 Americans. Here is a summary of the key findings.
Headline Results
- Nearly half (48%) of Americans ranked curing diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer's among their top three hopes for AI, followed by helping people with disabilities (36%), and then making technological progress and making life easier in general (tied at 23%).
- AI-driven job loss was the most commonly cited fear in every U.S. state, held by 64% of Americans. The second most prominent concern was cognitive dependency (56%), followed by misinformation (52%).
- Support for government involvement in AI was strong: over 70% of those surveyed believe the government should play a role in regulating AI, and this support crossed party lines. The areas where people most wanted government action were privacy (56%), child safety (52%), and liability for harm (49%).
- When asked what would best ensure AI benefits humanity, Americans ranked holding AI companies legally liable for harm (47%) and prioritizing safety over growth (44%) as the highest-impact actions.
- Only 15% of Americans said they trust AI companies to make decisions about how AI is developed and used.
Notably, on most questions AI did not sharply divide Americans along partisan, geographic, or educational lines. There was broad consensus: 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. Where disagreement existed, it was largely in the intensity of people's views rather than their direction.
This research complements other ongoing efforts at Anthropic to understand how people use Claude and think about AI development. Anthropic recently conducted a global qualitative study of 81,000 Claude users through Anthropic Interviewer, a tool for in-depth interviews at scale. The company also regularly releases 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 Anthropic has surveyed the general public, enabling the company to reach non-users of AI and better understand how attitudes differ across demographic groups.
The Anthropic Public Record will be repeated on a regular basis, evolving in scope as new topics become more relevant, and enabling Anthropic to track how public attitudes toward AI shift as model capabilities advance and adoption deepens. Future waves are planned to expand beyond the United States.
Method in Brief
Anthropic conducted a nationally representative online survey in November and December 2025 of 51,993 Americans, sourced from YouGov and weighted to U.S. Census benchmarks. State samples ranged from n=232 (Alaska) to n=1,902 (New York), with state-level margins of error between ±2.6 and ±9.1 percentage points.
What Americans Hope AI Will Deliver
Respondents were asked to choose their top three hopes for AI from a list of 17 options. Curing disease topped the list at 48%, 12 percentage points ahead of the second most commonly selected item-helping people with disabilities at 36%. Options like therapy and reducing loneliness, or hopes that AI might substitute for human contact, were ranked lowest.
What Americans Fear
Respondents were given a list of 20 possible AI-related harms, asked to flag each one they felt personally concerned by, and then to rate each on a five-point worry scale. Any response of 2 (somewhat worried) or higher was counted as worried.
Job loss was the most common concern at nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans. This was followed by cognitive dependency-in which AI integration leaves people unable to think for themselves-at 56%, and misinformation at 52%. Job loss and cognitive dependency were also among the top fears in Anthropic's qualitative study of 81,000 Claude users.
The most prevalent fears tended to be near-term and concrete: job loss, cognitive dependency, misinformation, criminal use, and surveillance. Each of these concerns has precedent in earlier technologies-automation causing job loss, smartphones fostering dependency, and social media spreading misinformation. In general, Americans appeared more concerned with misuse of AI than with AI misalignment, citing criminal use, surveillance, and terrorism more frequently than, for example, AI "going rogue."
For all but three of the listed harms, a majority of respondents described themselves as "not worried," but no potential harm had fewer than one-quarter of Americans expressing at least some concern.
Patterns with Job Loss
Sixty-four percent of Americans are worried that AI will displace jobs. The concern is remarkably evenly distributed-it is the top-ranked fear among Democrats (67%) and Republicans (62%), in households with children (59%) and without (66%), and in every state from Iowa at the high end (71%) to Mississippi at the low end (57%).
Job loss concerns are higher among more educated Americans
Concerns over job displacement rise with education level. Americans with postgraduate degrees are nearly 10 percentage points more worried about job loss than those with a high school education or less. In other words, the workers most worried about displacement are those whose work already overlaps more closely with what AI is being asked to do-a finding echoed in Anthropic's economic research team's analysis of the global Anthropic Interviewer study.
Fear of job loss is heightened among those who use AI least
At the same time, people who use AI at work every day are notably less worried about job loss than people who do not use AI at all: 54% versus 70%. Possible explanations include that hands-on experience may help people develop skills to augment rather than automate parts of their jobs, and that direct use may reveal AI's current limitations.
Perceived Capabilities and Acceptance of AI at Work
Respondents were given a list of 14 workplace tasks and asked how well they think AI could perform each task today, as well as how much AI involvement they would prefer in their own jobs.
Overall assessment of AI capabilities was fairly high. At the top, 75% of Americans said AI was as good as or better than humans at research. At the bottom, 44% said the same about service and support. However, on most tasks, a majority of Americans did not want AI involved.
Cognitive Dependency Is an Anticipatory Fear
The second most common fear in the survey was cognitive dependency on AI. To explore whether people are actually experiencing dependency, Anthropic asked respondents how much disruption they would feel if AI became unavailable tomorrow, and compared answers between those worried about dependency and those who were not.
Cognitive dependency appears to be a mostly anticipatory fear: of the 56% of Americans who expressed some worry about dependence, only roughly one-fifth would feel significant disruption if AI disappeared. Conversely, among the 44% who are not worried about dependency, a higher share-roughly one-third-would actually feel significant disruption.
Anthropic's qualitative research among 81,000 Claude users found that educators were 2.5 to 3 times more likely than average to report having witnessed cognitive atrophy firsthand, presumably in their students. In the Anthropic Public Record, educators are likewise among the occupations most worried about dependency, second only to people working in arts and design. As with job loss, the dependency fear falls steadily with usage: Americans who use AI daily at work are 16 points less worried about dependency (46%) than those who never do (62%).
What the Heaviest AI Users Reveal
As of late 2025, about 6% of Americans used AI every day for both work and personal purposes. These "integrated users" may offer a preview of what more intensive AI adoption looks like and possibly where mainstream opinion is headed.
Integrated users skew young, male, urban, employed, and college-educated. Nearly two-thirds describe themselves as people who experiment with new technology before most others or adopt it early once they see its potential, compared to 30% in the general public. Integrated users are less worried than the general public across each of the listed harms, though this likely reflects the general outlook of early adopters.
What Americans Want from AI Governance
Seventy-one percent of Americans say the government should be involved in the development and regulation of AI. The figure is 79% among Democrats, 68% among Republicans, and 69% among Independents-a bipartisan supermajority. A majority in every state and territory surveyed supports government involvement in AI, from 81% in the District of Columbia to 63% in Hawaii.
Where Americans want government to act
When asked about eight specific domains and how heavily the government should be involved in each, only two-privacy and child safety-drew outright majority support for more than a minimal role. National security had the narrowest partisan gap, just three points between Democrats and Republicans.
What Americans Want from the Industry
When asked what should happen to ensure AI is developed in humanity's interest, Americans converged on two answers: holding AI companies legally liable for harm (47% chose it among their top three) and prioritizing safety over growth (44%). Independent watchdogs with real power (29%) and slowing AI development for safety (27%) followed.
The Trust Deficit
Only 15% of Americans said they trust AI companies to make decisions about how the technology is developed and used. That was the lowest figure for any institution tested, below the federal government (20%), state and local government (19%), and international bodies (20%), and far below independent experts (43%).
Integrated Users Have a Similar Appetite for Regulation and Oversight
Integrated users were more trusting of every institution 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 in AI at essentially the national rate (74% versus 71%), and across the eight specific governance domains tested, their preferences were nearly indistinguishable from the general public's.
Anthropic's Initiatives and What Comes Next
Public input is critical to ensuring that powerful AI serves humanity's interests. The Anthropic Public Record, Anthropic Interviewer, the Anthropic Economic Index, and many of Anthropic's other research projects are all efforts to gain greater understanding and input from the public about how to make the AI transition go well.
Anthropic recently announced several policy frameworks relevant to these findings. Anthropic's Advanced AI Framework proposes mandatory independent safety testing for frontier models, transparency requirements, and government authority to block or recall dangerous AI deployments. Anthropic's Economic Policy Framework lays out how governments can prepare for AI's economic impacts-minimizing job displacement where possible and supporting workers so that AI's benefits are broadly shared.
The direction AI takes should not be set only by the companies building it. The more clearly the public's hopes and concerns are measured, the better Anthropic-and other companies-can meet them.
Appendix: Methodology
Population and mode: The Anthropic Public Record is an online survey of the U.S. late-teen and adult internet population, age 16 and over, resident in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or Puerto Rico. Fieldwork was conducted by YouGov from its online panel between November 1 and December 11, 2025.
Sample design: The study was designed as 52 parallel state and territory samples with a target of approximately 1,000 completes per state (approximately 500 in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Vermont, and Puerto Rico). Quotas were set within each state on age, gender, education, and race/ethnicity. The achieved sample was 51,993 completes, with state sample sizes ranging from 232 (Alaska) to 1,902 (New York).
Weighting: Data were weighted to be representative of the U.S. resident population age 16 and over on state, age, gender, education, and race/ethnicity. Weights were normalized to the achieved sample size (mean 1.00, sum 51,993).
Margin of error: The national margin of sampling error is ±0.6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level for a proportion of 50%. State-level margins of error range from ±2.6 points (California, New York, Texas) to ±9.1 points (Wyoming). Margins of error for subgroups are larger.
Reporting conventions: All percentages are weighted. Unless noted otherwise, percentages use the full segment as the denominator (respondents who answered "don't know" or skipped remain in the base). "Worried" on the fears battery is the top four boxes of a five-point worry scale. "As good or better" on the capability battery is the top three boxes of a five-point performance scale. "Integrated users" are respondents who report using AI one or more times daily for work and one or more times daily for personal purposes (unweighted n=2,717). Party affiliation groups include leaners.
Limitations: The Anthropic Public Record captures what Americans believed about AI in late 2025. Anthropic is treating it as a baseline.