AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports describing how people use products like Claude and ChatGPT. Those reports help shape public understanding of how generative AI is being adopted in the real world.
But researchers say those disclosures come with a major limitation: the companies control what data is released. As summarized in MIT Technology Review’s report, AI researchers argue that firms "only release the data they want us to see," leaving outsiders with a partial view of actual usage patterns.
That creates a verification gap. “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a Computer Science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research group, underscoring how difficult it remains to independently confirm company claims about how their AI systems are being used.