People work alongside AI more than they hand jobs to it, but businesses do the opposite
In Anthropic's data, 52% of chats are people working with Claude. Businesses building Claude into software hand over about 3 in 4 tasks.
Anthropic sorts the work people bring to Claude into two kinds. Working with it means a back-and-forth where the person stays involved: asking questions, editing drafts, learning something. Handing it over means giving Claude a task and taking the result. Which of these dominates matters for the jobs argument, because the first makes a worker faster and the second replaces a step.
Its January 2026 report sampled 1 million chats and 1 million business connections from November 2025. Among people chatting on Claude.ai, working with it rose to 52% and handing over fell to 45%. Among businesses that wire Claude into their own software, about three-quarters was handing over. Coding and other computer work was the largest category on both: 34% of chats, 46% of business use.
A follow-up in June 2026 surveyed about 9,700 users and matched their answers to what they actually did. Close to 6 in 10 expected AI to take on more of their tasks next year, and 57% said it made their own skills more valuable. One in 10 thought losing their job was likely.
What it means
The split explains why people argue past each other about AI and jobs. Individuals mostly experience AI as a tool that helps them work, which is what the chat data shows. Companies building AI into their systems mostly use it to take a step out of the process, which is the pattern in the business data. Both are happening at once, in the same product, and this is one company’s view of its own customers rather than a picture of the economy.
Caveats
- This is one company’s data about its own platform, and the categories were assigned by machine, not by people reading the chats. This site is also partly built with that company’s AI, so read it alongside the ChatGPT and survey entries.
- The survey sample isn’t representative of workers in general: about 30% of those who answered work in computing or maths.
- Anthropic’s own terms are “augmentation” for working with the AI and “automation” for handing a task over.