18 August 2026

Researchers find AI companies hide half of actual user conversations

• Researchers built an independent platform to analyze real AI conversations, discovering companies filter out roughly half of all chats from their published reports.
• The hidden conversations include significant volumes of health, relationship, harassment, and sexual content that company data omits.
• This gap means public understanding of how people actually use AI chatbots differs substantially from what companies like Anthropic disclose.

How it was covered

The AlgorithmMIT Technology Review

Researchers created an independent platform analyzing real AI conversations to fill gaps in company-published usage data. They found AI companies like Anthropic filter out nearly half of conversations, missing significant health, relationship, harassment, and sexual content uses that independent analysis reveals.