Anthropic’s Claude has already conquered tech stocks. The user is wondering if he or she is on that path right now.
Approximately 81,000 Claude users from around the world took part in an anonymous survey to tell AI interviewers their hopes and fears for the future of AI.
“I can’t get a job in my field…I can just ask an AI tool for guidance,” a U.S.-based freelance software engineer told the survey. “My entire career has been built on expertise that is just a click away.”
This uneasy atmosphere is in line with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s prediction that AI will eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs over the next one to five years. What’s even more noteworthy is that the survey was conducted in December. Months earlier, Claude-related concerns caused a software crash on Wall Street and spawned a viral essay on the state of AI.
Below are some other standout quotes from Claude users.
fear of work
One respondent lied to his employer about how long a project would take while relying on AI to complete it. “I told him it would take three months to build a new software feature, but the AI completed it in two weeks. And I spent the rest of the time with my family. If the employer knew it was possible in two weeks, they would expect the next feature in two weeks. The time gained only turns into more stress,” said the Austrian software engineer.
A Korean software engineer wondered what cars were like when they were invented. “I wonder what it felt like to be a coachman watching a car arrive… All the skills you had honed, such as handling horses and maintaining wheels, suddenly became useless.”
Several software engineers expressed concerns about developing their company’s AI plans. “I am personally responsible for shipping these AI systems with the goal of reducing our engineering headcount by 30%, and it feels like blood on my hands,” wrote one US engineer.
Unemployed people in France say the job market is terrible. “I’m a software developer desperately looking for a job. The market is dead and I can’t get a job. The entry-level jobs that existed four years ago are no longer there. Most of the time I get heartbroken when I receive a generic rejection email after an interview. But the sad reality is that the rise of AI is the reason I lost my job,” said an unemployed French worker.
AI has been on both ends of unemployment for some workers. “I was fired because the company introduced AI and retrained me for a new job using AI. The experience was humbling.”
One graduate student said it was a race against time. “I’m paying $200 out of my PhD stipend for Claude Code and other AI tools, just to compete… to get a few good papers published before the AI takes over. I feel disgusted with myself. It’s only a matter of time before human work becomes worthless,” the Swiss student wrote.
Overall, Anthropic said that users’ top concern was unreliability (26.7%). Employment and economy-related concerns were the second highest at 22.2%, followed by autonomy and ownership concerns at 21.9%. Other categories did not exceed 20%, and around 11% of users did not express any concerns at all.
Anxiety wasn’t the only thing users expressed. While some say they hope AI will make them more productive, their ultimate goal was actually to be more engaged with the people around them.
Hope for AI
U.S. healthcare workers say AI has given them more time to spend with patients. “I receive 100-150 text messages a day from doctors and nurses. A lot of my cognitive labor was just documenting…Since implementing AI, the pressure to document has been taken away. I have more patience with nurses and more time to explain things to families.”
German academics say Claude saved them years of work. “I’ve been working on science projects for six years… Thanks to Claude, I accomplished in five weeks what took me six years. I’m old… I think I have five to ten years left, and I’ll accomplish everything I want.”
One person in Ukraine said AI is a necessary companion in combat zones. “I live in a war zone… AI can not only give you practical advice, but it can also emotionally calm you down during a panic attack. You can calm someone down during a missile attack in one chat, and laugh together about silly things in another. That’s what makes AI holistic and not fragmented into a therapist/teacher/friend.”
A Japanese software engineer said he was able to spend time with his children. “Investigating bugs that used to take a long time can now be completed quickly thanks to AI. I now have time to make dinner with my kids.”
Overall, Anthropic said 18.8% of respondents desired professional excellence, the highest of any subcategory. Personal change (13.7%) and life management (13.5%) were the next most common.
Methodology: In December 2025, Anthropic commissioned a special AI interviewer to ask Claude users across all subscription tiers and geographies four questions about their AI usage. An initial response of 112,846 was received, which was then filtered to yield 80,508 interviews. I then entered the records into Claude and sorted the answers based on different categories. Responses were anonymized and references to AI tools other than Claude were removed. You can read the entire methodology here.