Anthropic study of 207,000 research sessions: scientists use Claude mostly for data analysis and writing

Anthropic published a report on how scientists use Claude, Claude Code and Claude Science. It analyzed 207,049 sessions on consumer plans from August 2 to September 30, 2026 (128,914 on Claude and Cowork, 78,135 on Claude Code). A classifier labelled each session with a field and research task, and Anthropic says only those labels were kept and results are reported in aggregate.

What Anthropic reports:

• Fields: relative to the number of researchers, computer science, mathematics and statistics use Claude more, and health and lab-based physical sciences less. Computer science is 4.3% of the world's researchers but 32.7% of Claude Code sessions.
• Tasks: data analysis is 33.7% of Claude sessions and 48.1% of Claude Code sessions, against 27.6% of researcher time. Writing is 32.0% of Claude sessions. Data gathering (11.5%) and idea generation (4.2% on Claude, 2.1% on Claude Code) are used less than the time they take, though a survey of 528 AI-using scientists ranks idea generation and data gathering as the most important for important results.
• Claude Science: idea generation is about 8% of its sessions, roughly the share of researcher time it takes, and tasks are more specialized than on Claude. Anthropic reads this as specialized tools narrowing the gap.
• Capability: the tasks AI is theoretically best suited to get two to four times as much use as researcher time would predict.
• Scenarios: from a simple model, Anthropic says current capabilities could double research output in some fields. If AI did all non-physical research work, computer science and statistics could rise up to 15-fold and chemistry and biology three- or fourfold. About 40% of surveyed researchers expect AI to carry out full research projects by 2030.