Anthropic Education Report How Educators Use Claude

Anthropic education report: How educators use Claude \ Anthropic Societal Impacts Anthropic Education Report: How educators use Claude Aug 27, 2025

Understandably, much of the conversation of AI in education focuses on how students are using large language models to help them study and write. But educators use AI too. In a recent Gallup survey, teachers reported that AI tools saved them an average of 5.9 hours per week. And in an inversion of the usual discussion, students have begun expressing concerns about professors using AI in the classroom. We previously reported data on how students were using AI. Our new analysis looks at professors: we analyzed ~74,000 anonymized conversations from higher education professionals across the world on Claude.ai this past May and June. 1 We also partnered with Northeastern University to hear directly from faculty how they were using AI within the university. Our findings provide an empirical snapshot of educator AI adoption, specifically in university settings. We find that: Educators use AI in and out of the classroom Educators’ uses range from developing course materials and writing grant proposals to academic advising and managing administrative tasks like admissions and financial planning. Educators aren't just using chatbots; they're building their own custom tools with AI Faculty are using Claude Artifacts to create interactive educational materials, such as chemistry simulations, automated grading rubrics, and data visualization dashboards. Educators tend to automate the drudgery while staying in the loop for everything else Tasks requiring significant context, creativity, or direct student interaction—like designing lessons, advising students, and writing grant proposals—are where educators are more likely to use AI as an enhancement. In contrast, routine administrative work such as financial management and record-keeping are more automation-heavy. Some educators are automating grading; others are deeply opposed In our Claude.ai data, faculty used AI for grading and evaluation less frequently than other uses, but when they did, 48.9% of the time they used it in an automation-heavy way (where the AI directly performs the task). That’s despite educator concerns about automating assessment tasks, as well as our surveyed faculty rating it as the area where they felt AI was least effective.

Identifying educators’ use of Claude In this research, we used our automated analysis research tool that reveals broad patterns of Claude usage while protecting users’ privacy. Studying higher education professionals’ use of Claude.ai presents unique challenges, as we don’t currently collect self-reported occupational data on our platform. Unlike students who often explicitly mention coursework or assignments, educators’ AI interactions span teaching, research, administration, and personal learning, making them harder to identify and categorize. Using our privacy-preserving tool, we analyzed conversations from Claude.ai Free and Pro accounts associated with higher education email addresses and then automatically filtered conversations for educator-specific tasks—such as creating syllabi, grading assignments, or developing course materials. 2 This filtering yielded approximately 74,000 conversations from a period in May and June. Our analysis should be viewed as an exploration of how educators use AI for profession-specific tasks, not a comprehensive view of all educator AI usage. We also matched each conversation to the most appropriate task from the comprehensive list of educator tasks in the O*NET database of occupational information from the U.S. Department of Labor. We identified educator tasks as tasks associated with “Postsecondary” teaching or administrative occupations. We complemented our analysis with survey data and qualitative research from 22 Northeastern University faculty members who are early adopters of AI to shed light on educators' motivations, concerns, and usage patterns. Common uses among educators The most prominent use of AI, as revealed by both our Claude.ai analysis and our qualitative research with Northeastern, was for curriculum development. Our Claude.ai analysis also surfaced academic research and assessing student performance as the second and third most common uses. Top three AI uses among educators, as based on 74,000 conversations of Claude.ai data: Develop curricula (57% of the conversations in our analysis), Conduct academic research (13%), and Assess student performance (7%). The augmentation/automation spectrum of how faculty use AI for these tasks is also displayed. In our surveys, Northeastern faculty reported that another common case was using AI for their own learning (29% of their AI time on average). However, this was not studied in our Claude.ai analysis, given the filtering mechanism and the difficulty of distinguishing between student and educator usage in these learning instances. Some other particularly interesting uses we discovered in the Claude.ai data include: Create mock legal scenarios for educational simulations; Develop vocational education and workforce training content; Draft recommendation letters for academic or professional applications; Create meeting agendas and related administrative documents.

Why faculty use AI in these cases Our qualitative research with Northeastern faculty hints at why educators often gravitate towards these common AI uses: Automation of a tedious task (“It takes care of the tedious tasks”; helps with “rote portions of fundraising”); Collaborative thought partner (“AI can find effective ways to explain concepts to students that I had not thought of myself”); Personalized learning experiences for students (“AI is useful for giving students and me individualized, interactive learning experiences beyond what one instructor could provide”).

How educators are building custom tools with AI One of the most inspiring findings is how educators use Claude's Artifacts feature to create interactive educational materials. Rather than just having conversations, educators are often building complete, functional resources that in some cases they can immediately deploy in their classrooms. As one surveyed Northeastern faculty member put it: “ What was prohibitively expensive (time) to do [before] now becomes possible. Custom simulation, illustration, interactive experiment. Wow. Much more engaging for students.” Key creations built by educators Interactive…