Societal Impacts
Working closely with the Anthropic Policy and Safeguards teams, Societal Impacts is a technical research team that explores how AI is used in the real world.
Sociotechnical alignment
Which human values should AI models hold, and how should they operate in the face of conflicting or ambiguous values? How is AI used (and misused) in the wild? How can we anticipate future uses and risks of AI? Societal Impacts researchers develop experiments, training methods, and evaluations to answer these questions.
Policy relevance
Though the Societal Impacts team is technical, they often pick research questions that have policy relevance. They believe that providing trustworthy research concerning topics policymakers care about will lead to better policy (and overall) outcomes for everyone.
How AI is transforming work at Anthropic
We surveyed Anthropic engineers and researchers, conducted in-depth qualitative interviews, and studied internal Claude Code usage data to find out how AI use is changing how we do our jobs. We found that AI use is radically changing the nature of work for software developers.
Introducing Anthropic Interviewer: What 1,250 professionals told us about working with AI
We built an interview tool called Anthropic Interviewer. Powered by Claude, Anthropic Interviewer runs detailed interviews automatically and at unprecedented scale.
Values in the wild: Discovering and analyzing values in real-world language model interactions
What values does Claude actually express during real conversations? Analyzing 700,000 interactions, this paper creates the first large-scale empirical taxonomy of AI values and finds that Claude adapts its expressed values to context—mirroring users in most cases, but resisting when core principles are at stake.
Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models
Large models have predictable loss via scaling laws but unpredictable capabilities. This tension has significant policy implications.
Publications
- Measuring AI agent autonomy in practice
- Introducing Anthropic Interviewer: What 1,250 professionals told us about working with AI
- How AI is transforming work at Anthropic
- Anthropic Education Report: How educators use Claude
- How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship
- Anthropic Economic Index: AI’s impact on software development
- Values in the wild: Discovering and analyzing values in real-world language model interactions
- Anthropic Education Report: How university students use Claude
- Anthropic Economic Index: Insights from Claude 3.7 Sonnet
- The Anthropic Economic Index