Hello and welcome to Eye on AI…In this edition: OpenAI and Anthropic detail chatbot usage trends…AI companies promise big investments in the U.K….and the FTC probes chatbots’ impact on kids.Yesterday saw the release of dueling studies from OpenAI and Anthropic about the usage of their respective AI chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude. The studies provide a good snapshot of who is using AI chatbots and what they are using them for. But the two reports were also a study in contrasts, with OpenAI clearly emerging as primarily a consumer product, while Claude’s use cases were more professionally-oriented.The ChatGPT study confirmed the huge reach OpenAI has, with 700 million active weekly users, or almost 10% of the global population, exchanging some 18 billion messages with the chatbot every week. And the majority of those messages—70%—were classified by the study’s authors as “non-work” queries. Of these, about 80% of the messages fell into three big categories: practical guidance, writing help, and seeking information. Within practical guidance, teaching or tutoring queries accounted for more than a third of messages. How many of these were students using ChatGPT to “help” with homework or class assignments was unclear—but ChatGPT has a young user base, with nearly half of all messages coming from those under the age of 26.Educated professionals more likely to be using ChatGPT for workWhen ChatGPT was used for work, it was most likely to be used by highly-educated users working in high-paid professions. While this is perhaps not surprising, it is a bit depressing.There is a vision of our AI future, one which I outline in my book, Mastering AI, in which the technology becomes a leveling force. With the help of AI copilots and decision-support systems, people with fewer qualifications or experience could take on some of the work currently performed by more skilled and experienced professionals. They might not earn as much as those more qualified individuals, but they could still earn a good middle-class income. To some extent, this already happens in law, with paralegals, and in medicine, with nurse practitioners. But this model could be extended to other professions, for instance accounting and finance—democratizing access to professional advice and helping shore up the middle class.There’s another vision of our AI future, however, where the technology only makes economic inequality worse, with the most educated and credentialed using AI to become even more productive, while everyone else falls farther behind. I fear that, as this ChatGPT data suggests, that’s the way things may be heading.While there’s been a lot of discussion lately of the benefits and dangers of using chatbots for companionship, or even romance, OpenAI’s research showed messages classified as being about relationships constituted just 2.4% of messages, personal reflection 1.9%, and role-playing and games 0.4%.Interestingly, given how fiercely all the leading AI companies—including OpenAI—compete with one another on coding benchmarks and tout the coding performance of their models, coding was a relatively small use case for ChatGPT, constituting just 4.2% of the messages the researchers analyzed. (One big caveat here is that the research only looked at the consumer versions of ChatGPT—its free, premium, and pro tiers—but not usage of the OpenAI API or enterprise ChatGPT subscriptions, which is how many business users may access ChatGPT for professional use cases.) Meanwhile, coding constituted 39% of Claude.ai’s usage. Software development tasks also dominated the use of Anthropic’s API.Automation rather than augmentation dominates work usageRead together, both studies also hinted at an intriguing contrast in how people were using chatbots in work contexts, compared to more personal ones. ChatGPT messages classified as non-work related were more about what the researchers called “asking”—which involved seeking information or advice—as opposed to “doing” prompts, where the chatbot was asked to complete a task for the user. But in work-related messages, “doing” prompts were more common, constituting 56% of message traffic. For Anthropic, where work-related messages seemed more dominant to begin with, there was a clear trend for users to ask the chatbot to complete tasks for them, and in fact the majority of Anthropic’s API usage (some 77%) was classified as automation requests. Anthropic’s research also indicated that many of the tasks that were most popular with business users of Claude also were those that were most expensive to run, indicating that companies are probably finding—despite some other survey and anecdotal evidence to the contrary—that the value of automating tasks with AI is indeed worth the money.The studies also indicate that in business contexts people increasingly want AI models to automate tasks for them, not necessarily offer decision support or expert advice. This could have significant implications for economies as a whole: If companies mostly use the technology to automate tasks, the negative effect of AI on jobs is likely to be far greater.There were lots of other interesting tidbits in the two studies. For instance, whereas previous usage data had shown a significant gender gap, with men far more likely than women to be using ChatGPT, the new study shows that gap has now disappeared. Anthropic’s research shows interesting geographic divergence in Claude usage too—usage is concentrated on the coasts, which is to be expected, but there are also hotspots in Utah and Nevada.With that, here’s more AI news.Jeremy Kahnjeremy.kahn@fortune.com@jeremyakahnThis story was originally featured on Fortune.com