💯 Anthropic reveals how 1,250 professionals feel about AI

Hey, it’s Max 👋

Before we get int the big stuff this week, I need to show you something important.

It’s a lamp. A Toy Story-esque expressive desk lamp called Ongo. It’s one of the clearest signs of where things are heading. Not because it’s cute (it is). But it feels like everything from hardware, software, and especially our work, is waking up with AI.

And that brings me to the thing I’ve been most excited to dive into this week:

Anthropic built an AI to interview people about AI

Anthropic released their new Interviewer tool which they used to ran AI-led interviews with 1250 professionals so far. People actually opened up and the results paint one of the clearest pictures of how people really feel about using AI at work.

People want to keep the parts of their job that feel like them

They’ll offload formatting, research, admin, grunt work. But they hold onto decisions, direction, and anything tied to their identity or taste. It’s not exactly out of fear of AI replacing them but because they want to keep the work that actually means something.

There’s also a huge social layer here.

69% of professionals feel weird using AI at work

A surprising number of people said they hide their AI use because they don’t want to look lazy, or inexperienced, or “the AI person.” Someone in the study said a coworker trash-talked AI in a meeting and she just sat there quietly, even though she relies on it daily.

I get it. I get hundreds of emails from people who are using AI in private but feeling uncertain about how to talk about it, learn it properly, or integrate it without feeling like they’re "cheating." It’s the reason the team at 100 School and myself are running and constantly optimizing the 30 Days of AI challenge to make it the most structured path through that fog.

Even inside Anthropic, the long-term picture is foggy

In their latest internal research where they looked into how AI is transforming work at Anthropic, one engineer said:

Another:

The people closest to the technology feel the same uncertainty the rest of us do.

If you’re leading a team, I think it’s important to understand that the gap between private usage vs public silence is bigger than you might realize. Across creative roles, science, operations, communications; everyone is improvising. And almost half of them think their future job looks less like “doing the work” and more like supervising, steering, or catching what the model misses. Which feels pretty honest.

Max 👋

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