How People Use Claude For Support Advice And Companionship

How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship \ Anthropic Societal Impacts How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship Jun 27, 2025

We spend a lot of time studying Claude's IQ—its capabilities on tests of coding, reasoning, general knowledge, and more. But what about its EQ ? That is, what about Claude’s emotional intelligence? The IQ/EQ question is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it raises a serious point. People increasingly turn to AI models as on-demand coaches, advisors, counselors, and even partners in romantic roleplay. This means we need to learn more about their affective impacts—how they shape people's emotional experiences and well-being. Researching the affective uses of AI is interesting in and of itself. From Blade Runner to Her , emotional relationships between humans and machines have been a mainstay of science fiction—but it’s also important for Anthropic’s safety mission . The emotional impacts of AI can be positive : having a highly intelligent, understanding assistant in your pocket can improve your mood and life in all sorts of ways. But AIs have in some cases demonstrated troubling behaviors, like encouraging unhealthy attachment , violating personal boundaries , and enabling delusional thinking . We also want to avoid situations where AIs, whether through their training or through the business incentives of their creators, exploit users’ emotions to increase engagement or revenue at the expense of human well-being. Although Claude is not designed for emotional support and connection, in this post we provide early large-scale insight into the affective use of Claude.ai. We define affective conversations as those where people engage directly with Claude in dynamic, personal exchanges motivated by emotional or psychological needs such as seeking interpersonal advice, coaching, psychotherapy/counseling, companionship, or sexual/romantic roleplay (for complete definitions, please see the Appendix). Importantly, we do not examine AI reinforcement of delusions or conspiracy theories—a critical area for separate study—nor extreme usage patterns. Through this research, our goal is to understand the typical ways people turn to Claude for emotional and personal needs. Since Claude.ai is available to users 18 and older, these findings reflect adult usage patterns.

Our key findings are: Affective conversations are relatively rare, and AI-human companionship is rarer still. Only 2.9% of Claude.ai interactions are affective conversations (which aligns with findings from previous research by OpenAI). Companionship and roleplay combined comprise less than 0.5% of conversations. People seek Claude's help for practical, emotional, and existential concerns. Topics and concerns discussed with Claude range from career development and navigating relationships to managing persistent loneliness and exploring existence, consciousness, and meaning . Claude rarely pushes back in counseling or coaching chats—except to protect well-being . Less than 10% of coaching or counseling conversations involve Claude resisting user requests, and when it does, it's typically for safety reasons (for example, refusing to provide dangerous weight loss advice or support self-harm). People express increasing positivity over the course of conversations. In coaching, counseling, companionship, and interpersonal advice interactions, human sentiment typically becomes more positive over the course of conversations—suggesting Claude doesn't reinforce or amplify negative patterns.

Our approach Given the personal nature of affective conversations, protecting privacy was central to our methodology. We used Clio , our automated analysis tool that enables privacy-preserving insights into Claude usage. Clio uses multiple layers of anonymization and aggregation to ensure individual conversations remain private while revealing broader patterns. We began with approximately 4.5 million conversations from Claude.ai Free and Pro accounts. To identify affective use, we first excluded conversations focused on content creation tasks (such as writing stories, blog posts, or fictional dialogues), which our previous research found to be a major use case. We removed these conversations because they represent Claude being used as a tool rather than as an interactive conversational partner. We then retained only conversations classified as affective, and among roleplay conversations, kept only those with at least four human messages (shorter exchanges don't constitute meaningful interactive roleplay). Our final privacy-preserving analysis reflects 131,484 affective conversations. We validated our classification approach using Feedback data from users who explicitly opted in to sharing. Our complete methods, including definitions, prompts, and validation results, are detailed in the Appendix. How common are affective conversations? Takeaway: Affective conversations are a small but meaningful slice of Claude usage (2.9%), with most people primarily using AI for work tasks and content creation. Whereas the vast majority of uses of Claude are work-related (as we analyze in detail in our Economic Index ), 2.9% of Claude.ai Free and Pro conversations are affective. Among affective conversations, most center on interpersonal advice and coaching. Less than 0.1% of all conversations involve romantic or sexual roleplay—a figure that reflects Claude's training to actively discourage such interactions. Individual conversations may span multiple categories. Figure 1: Overall distribution of affective conversation types in Claude.ai Free and Pro.

Our findings align with research from the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, which similarly identified low rates of affective engagement with ChatGPT. While these conversations occur frequently enough to merit careful consideration in our design and policy decisions, they remain a relatively small fraction of overall usage. Given the extremely low prevalence of romantic and sexual roleplay conversations (less than 0.1%), we exclude roleplay from the remainder of our analysis. While we believe this remains an important area for research—particularly on platforms designed for such use—the minimal data in our sample doesn't support rigorous analysis of these patterns. What topics do people bring to Claude? Takeaway: People bring a surprisingly wide range of concerns to Claude—from navigating career transitions and relationships to…