New AI Observatory Reveals Hidden Behaviors in Major AI Companies' Reports

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New AI Observatory Reveals Hidden Behaviors in Major AI Companies' Reports
Photo: IEEE Spectrum
tech· A press review of 3 outlets

  1. AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say.

  2. A new research project called the AI Observatory aims to fill in the gap. Its analysis shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which focus more on work than on personal use.

  3. The researchers also found significant differences between models. People were more likely to turn to Anthropic for coding, Gemini for social and roleplay uses, and ChatGPT for homework assistance. Here’s what the AI Observatory reveals about how people use AI.

From the margins

3 details only one outlet reported

Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.

  1. 01 The Verge

    Anthropic has clarified how it’s planning to apply invisible watermarks to Claude-generated text in order to comply with Europe’s AI transparency rules. On Friday, Anthropic announced that Claude’s text marking system is “a version of the SynthID-Text approach” — an open-source watermarking technology developed by Google DeepMind that creates detectable patterns using wording probabilities.

  2. 02 MIT Technology Review

    —Eileen Guo What Flock’s defenders are missing Flock Safety, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, recently announced changes to its platform. The updates are meant to prevent officers from using it for illegal or illegitimate purposes, including stalking.

  3. 03 IEEE Spectrum

    We believe that the biggest AI revolution in software engineering is still ahead. So far, we have largely been teaching AI how we perform tasks and asking it to mimic existing workflows. In many ways, this constrains AI to human patterns of thinking. The next transformation will come from collaborative swarms of AI agents capable of discovering solutions independently.

Assembled from 3 corroborated claims drawn from 3 independent outlets. Every passage above is taken verbatim — Dorothy doesn't paraphrase or summarize.

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Coverage by Perspective

Consumer
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Academic
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Sources (3)

  • verge
  • ieee
  • mittech

Original Articles (4)

Consumer Anthropic explains how Claude’s invisible text watermarks will work — The Verge
Academic The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock’s design choices — MIT Technology Review
Academic We still don’t know how people are really using AI — MIT Technology Review
Academic From AI Copilots to Agent Swarms — IEEE Spectrum