Clio: Privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use
Anthropic's Clio system provides privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use, analyzing conversations to understand how people use language models. It helps improve safety measures and identifies top tasks people use AI for, including coding, education, and busines…
Intelligence analysis by Llama

Clio is an automated analysis tool that enables privacy-preserving analysis of real-world language model use, giving insights into the day-to-day uses of AI systems while maintaining user privacy.
Clio is a tool that helps us understand how people use AI systems like language models. It looks at conversations people have with AI and groups them into topics, like coding or education. This helps us improve our safety measures and provide better services.
Analysis
Clio: A System for Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use
Clio is an automated analysis tool developed by Anthropic to provide privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use. The system enables bottom-up discovery of patterns by distilling conversations into abstracted, understandable topic clusters, while preserving user privacy. Data are automatically anonymized and aggregated, and only the higher-level clusters are visible to human analysts.
How Clio Works
Clio's multi-stage process involves extracting facets, semantic clustering, cluster description, and building hierarchies. These steps are powered entirely by Claude, not by human analysts. This is part of Anthropic's privacy-first design of Clio, with multiple layers to create 'defense in depth.' For example, Claude is instructed to extract relevant information from conversations while omitting private details. A minimum threshold for the number of unique users or conversations is also set, so that low-frequency topics (which might be specific to individuals) aren't inadvertently exposed. As a final check, Claude verifies that cluster summaries don't contain any overly specific or identifying information before they're displayed to the human user.
Insights from Clio
Using Clio, Anthropic has been able to glean high-level insights into how people use claude.ai in practice. The system has identified top tasks people use Claude for, including coding-related tasks, educational uses, and business strategy. Clio has also revealed a rich variety of uses for Claude, including dream interpretation, analysis of soccer matches, disaster preparedness, and more. Claude usage varies considerably across languages, reflecting varying cultural contexts and needs.
Implications and Future Work
Clio's privacy-preserving approach has significant implications for the development and deployment of AI systems. By enabling bottom-up discovery of patterns and preserving user privacy, Clio provides a valuable tool for understanding real-world AI use. Future work on Clio could involve expanding its capabilities to analyze other types of data, such as user feedback or system logs.
Key points
- Clio is an automated analysis tool for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use.
- Clio's multi-stage process involves extracting facets, semantic clustering, cluster description, and building hierarchies.
- Clio has identified top tasks people use Claude for, including coding-related tasks, educational uses, and business strategy.
- Claude usage varies considerably across languages, reflecting varying cultural contexts and needs.
Clio's insights could lead to the development of more effective safety measures for AI systems, reducing the risk of misuse and improving overall safety.
If Clio's insights are not used effectively, it could lead to a lack of understanding of real-world AI use, potentially resulting in ineffective safety measures and increased risk of misuse.



