OpenAI ChatGPT-5 introduction displayed on smartphone screen

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Here’s how people are actually using ChatGPT

The new report released in collaboration with the National Bureau of Economic Research offers one of the largest surveys of real-world AI chatbot use.

Jon Keegan

9/15/25 2:51PM

OpenAI has released its largest report yet on how real people are actually using ChatGPT. The fascinating working research paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, describes a wide-ranging study that used AI to analyze 1 million chat transcripts (no humans read any of the chats). The study has not been peer reviewed.

Some of the big takeaways from the paper:

💃 70% (!!!) of all queries were not related to work. That number may send a chill down the spine of Big Tech, as it’s betting on enterprise AI to generate enough revenue to justify the hundreds of billions it’s spending to build out AI infrastructure.
📝 Among work-related messages, the most common use for ChatGPT is writing, and mostly just to modify or improve a user’s text. Writing queries made up 42% of work-related messages and 52% of all messages from users who work in business and management.
🙋🏻 About half (49%) of all queries were classified as “asking” — for guidance, advice, or information. 40% of messages were requests classified as “doing,” or asking the chatbot to complete a task.
👩‍💻 Female users contributed more than half of all queries, as of July 2025. This is a massive shift from early on, when the vast majority of users were male. But it’s worth noting that the study determined this by classifying first names as masculine or feminine.
🛹 The youth loves AI. Half of all messages were from adults under 26.

The OpenAI researchers took a random sample of about 1 million messages between May 2024 and June 2025 from logged-in, adult ChatGPT users (who did not opt out of sharing their messages for training).

ChatGPT usage - Breakdown of tasks by topic. — Breakdown of tasks by topic (Chart: OpenAI/NBER)

This study is one of the largest surveys of real-world AI use, so this data will be of great interest to all the companies trying to figure out how they’re going to make money selling AI services.

One thing that stood out was how utilitarian the usage of AI was. Rather than falling in love with an AI chatbot or having deep conversations with your new AI buddy, it looks like people are just using it to make their work better and figure things out.

It remains to be seen how AI will end up being part of our everyday lives, but it might look a lot more boring than Silicon Valley is making it out to be.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5