Mostly quotes:
- 207K consumer user claude sessions (78K code, remainder chat+cowork) in Aug+Sep '26 classified per 7K SciNet taxonomy
- largest domains: computer science (11.9%), engineering (8.4%), and medicine (7.7%)
- higher ratio of usage/researcher: computer science, mathematics, statistics; social sciences
- "Usage is also high for the social sciences" ... "Relative usage is low in [...] the social sciences, with the exception of economics"
- Claude use and AI capability: "the top 20% of tasks also draw two to four times the expected use" "Health sciences researchers use Claude relatively little compared with the AI capability scores of their tasks"
- "Theoretical AI capability also predicts how much researchers allow Claude to work autonomously"
- "productivity gains tend to materialize only after organizations restructure around them (David 1990; Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson 2021)"
- "A surge in new research papers could advance a field faster but also overwhelm scientists’ capacity to absorb or verify the results."
- "As AI becomes more capable and autonomous, AI systems could take the lead in verification, refereeing, and communicating important results, which would ease the absorption problem discussed above"
- "Fifth, more autonomous AI systems may increase the challenge of ensuring that AI-driven research remains aligned with human goals"
- "One effect may be a change in researchers’ job satisfaction."