Scientists use Claude most where AI works best — and that could double research output
AI for scientific discovery: How researchers use Claude
Anthropic analyzed 207,000 research sessions on Claude and Claude Code using privacy-preserving classifiers. Scientists lean on Claude for data analysis and writing, less for idea generation and data gathering — even though they rank those as most important. Usage clusters in formal sciences like computer science, math, and statistics, and tracks how well AI can theoretically perform each task. A simple model suggests current capabilities could double output in some fields; full automation of non-physical work could lift computer science and statistics up to 15-fold.
Scientists appear to use AI where it works best.
- StableAlkyne
They are very good research assistants.
I would never trust an AI to make a scientific conclusion, but they're very good at some things:
- Plotting with natural language: "Create a scatter plot of column A versus column B, log scale Y and use stars sized by column C." Every plotting library (except maybe ggplot2 / plotnind) sucks, and the boilerplate never gets less tedius.
- Literature search, e.g. "Have there been any peer reviewed papers where they applied X method to Y domain"
- Complex visualization, e.g. "Make a self contained HTML file with a 3D interactive visualization of this graph. Add ball and spring position optimization and let me move nodes"
- Trying random stuff that would normally be too time consuming to be worth it, eg "Here is a dataset. Try regression methods A, B, and C and report a table." In this case, usually it will screw up and overfit, but it's a good smoke test.
Note how in all of these, it's being used for tedious things that provide some value, but ultimately they are only providing information to make a decision on.
Granted, I would like to have a research assistant I could train, but if your company will not create a position then there is not much you can do.
- w10-1
So: code + econ; researchers and organizations slated for overwhelm
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 sa […]
- dreambuffer
Don't like this style of article where the "How" is "in what manner do they use it?" and not "what techniques do they use?". I would prefer to see specific lab setups, how they use and coordinate agents, what kind of protocol they have for asking questions and verifying information, and so on.
- FailMore
This article talks about the outputs being Claude artifacts. I am curious if anyone has feedback on using Claude artifacts? What do you like/not like?
As a hobby I run https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs an agent agnositc artifact layer, so I'm looking for feedback on artifact use in general.
Here are some sample scientific SmallDoc artifacts:
Palmer penguins: body mass, flipper length and species - https://smalldocs.org/s/YrJDCfCD8-6j_uRE0pNCbI#k=odJRxWOIySV...
AlphaFold 3: capabilities, evidence and operational limits - https://smalldocs.org/s/rRRuByQhmhZNBH_4RNCx1t#k=S0Jhyf72Q6M...
- bemtevi
AI in science is a lot different than AI in progamming in some ways. It seems pretty harmless in programming a lot of the times because it's used to speed up rote tasks like writing boilerplate. But in science, if it does give scientists a boost in discovery, I think it's likely to lead to an even more cavalier attitude about the power that such discoveries can have, and thus lead to much more abuse of power by the wealthy and malicious actors.