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How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship

Anthropic's first large-scale study of 'affective use' of Claude, analyzing how people turn to the model for emotional support, advice, and companionship. Using the privacy-preserving Clio analysis tool over roughly 4.5 million Claude.ai Free and Pro conversations, the study isolates 131,484 affective conversations spanning interpersonal advice, coaching, counseling, companionship, and roleplay. It reports prevalence, topic patterns, refusal behavior, and within-conversation sentiment trajectories.

Read at anthropic.com Archived copy

Publisher

Anthropic

Published

27 Jun 2025

Added

3 months ago

DOI

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Key Findings

Only 2.9% of Claude.ai interactions are affective conversations; companionship and roleplay combined are under 0.5%.
Users bring practical, emotional, and existential concerns: career, relationships, persistent loneliness, and questions of meaning.
Claude refuses user requests in supportive contexts less than 10% of the time, with pushback concentrated on safety grounds (e.g., dangerous weight-loss advice, self-harm support).
Expressed user sentiment tends to shift slightly more positive over the course of affective conversations, with no clear negative spirals observed — though the authors caution this does not establish lasting emotional benefit.

Methodology Notes

~4.5M conversations from Claude.ai Free/Pro accounts screened down to 131,484 affective conversations; automated privacy-preserving analysis via Clio with multiple anonymization layers; classification validated against opt-in user feedback data. Limitations: expressed language only (no psychological outcomes), no longitudinal data on dependency, snapshot in time, text-only, and Claude is not designed for emotional support — limiting generalization to purpose-built companion platforms.

Sources

Anthropic research post(opens in a new tab) (primary)

Archived snapshot (Wayback Machine)(opens in a new tab) — preserved against link rot

Topics

Human-AI relationships AI companionship Dependency & parasocial attachment Digital mental health Vulnerable users

Authors

Miles McCain, Ryn Linthicum, Chloe Lubinski, Alex Tamkin, Saffron Huang, Michael Stern, Kunal Handa, Esin Durmus, Tyler Neylon, Stuart Ritchie, Kamya Jagadish, Paruul Maheshwary, Sarah Heck, Alexandra Sanderford, Deep Ganguli

Cite This

APA

Miles McCain et al. (2025). How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship. Anthropic. https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-people-use-claude-for-support-advice-and-companionship