Anthropic studied what scientists ask its AI assistant Claude to do, using 207,049 research sessions from August and September 2026. A language model read each session and kept only two labels, the field (such as chemistry) and the task (such as data cleaning), so the research team saw only those labels, not the research itself. Analysing data came first. It made up 33.7% of sessions in the Claude chat app and 48.1% in Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool, more than the 27.6% of working time that researchers spend on analysis, by Anthropic’s estimate. Writing took 32.0% of chat sessions, twice its share of research time.
The study shows where AI already helps science. In a separate survey of 528 researchers who already use AI, mostly in health and life sciences, respondents ranked coming up with ideas as the most important task for big results. Yet idea generation was only 4.2% of chat sessions, against 7.1% of research time. Gathering data was 11.5% of chat sessions against 28.6% of research time, and much of it, such as collecting clinical samples, is physical work.
About 40% of surveyed researchers expect AI to run whole research projects on its own by 2030, and 16% say it never will. Anthropic’s model, which it calls an illustration and not a forecast, says wide use of today’s tools could double research output in computer science but raise it only 1.4 times in chemistry, where about 40% of researcher time goes to physical lab steps.
Read More: Claude Science fills the third of the sky that no ultraviolet telescope photographed
Sources:
- How scientists use Claude (Anthropic)
- Anthropic: computer science dominates research use of Claude (AI Weekly)
- Researchers turn to Claude for analysis and writing, study finds (RohitAI)
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Citation
@misc{kabui2026,
author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
title = {Anthropic {Study:} {Scientists} {Use} {Claude} {Most} for
{Data} {Analysis} and {Writing}},
date = {2026-11-10},
url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/how-scientists-use-claude-207000-research-sessions/},
langid = {en-GB}
}