Anthropic Economic Index report: Learning curves - Anthropic

There is a compounding advantage baked into using Claude, and Anthropic has the data to show it.

The company released its March 2026 Economic Index on Tuesday, a quarterly report that uses a privacy-preserving analysis system called Clio to study how people actually use Claude across the economy. The headline finding this time is about learning curves. Users who have been on the platform for six months or more have a roughly 10 percent higher conversation success rate than newer users, an association that persists even after controlling for what task they are doing, their country, or other observable factors. Maxim Massenkoff, Eva Lyubich, Peter McCrory, Ruth Appel, and Ryan Heller are the authors.

The framing matters. Anthropic notes that the 10 percent gap "could reflect sophistication of early adopters" rather than learning-by-doing — meaning the people who stuck around might simply have been better at the start. But the report also acknowledges it could be evidence that people get genuinely better at eliciting useful outputs from a language model through practice. That distinction is not just academic. If AI fluency compounds with use, early adopters are not getting a head start — they are getting better at getting value out of the model. That is a different picture of how the benefits of AI distribute themselves through the economy.

The report also captures a platform in the middle of a broadening phase. Coding still dominates: tasks associated with Computer and Mathematical occupations account for 35 percent of conversations on Claude.ai. But the concentration at the top is thinning. The top 10 tasks now represent 19 percent of Claude.ai traffic, down from 24 percent in November 2025. Meanwhile, personal use — sports queries, product comparisons, home maintenance questions — rose from 35 percent to 42 percent of conversations over the same period, while coursework fell from 19 percent to 12 percent. Some of that coursework drop reflects winter academic calendars; some of it reflects a wave of new signups that pulled in more casual users.

The platform is also splitting along a coding-vs-collaboration fault line. Coding tasks are migrating off the consumer web interface and onto the API, where Claude Code — Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent — breaks work into smaller automated calls. That means the 35 percent coding share on Claude.ai is actually understating how much coding Claude does overall, because the API side is growing fast and the task labels fragment across more categories once automation enters the picture.

On the question of inequality, the signals are pointed in opposite directions depending on geography. Within the United States, adoption is diffusing: the top five states by per-capita usage now account for 24 percent of volume, down from 30 percent in August 2025. At the current rate of convergence, the country reaches roughly equal per-capita usage in five to nine years, slower than the two-to-five-year estimate in the previous report but still heading in the right direction. Globally, the picture is harder: the top 20 countries account for 48 percent of per-capita usage, up from 45 percent. The countries that were already using Claude most are pulling further ahead.

The learning-curve finding is the one worth sitting with. AI is often presented as a tool that democratizes capability — give everyone the same model, get the same outcomes. The Anthropic data pushes back on that. The people getting the most out of Claude are not just the ones doing the highest-value tasks. They are the ones who have been doing tasks with it longest, and who bring more education to the inputs, and who make different model choices — Opus is selected 4 percentage points above average for coding tasks and 7 points below average for tutoring among paying users. That combination of habits, strategies, and model selection is not captured in any benchmark. It shows up only in the outcomes.

The report covers usage through February 12, 2026, a period that includes the release of Claude Opus 4.6. It is also the first Economic Index published since the Pentagon designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a move that has since generated federal litigation. That context is absent from the report itself — it is a data document, not a policy response — but the usage picture it paints is a snapshot of a platform under genuine commercial stress and still expanding its reach.

Anthropic Economic Index March 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/research/economic-index-march-2026-report