Anthropic releases new Economic Index with hourly usage data

The Economic Index report now tracks Claude usage at the hourly level. Personal queries rise from 35% on weekdays to nearly 50% on weekends, and recipe queries at 6 p.m. occur 2.3 times more often than average. Leading up to the U.S. tax deadline on April 14, tax-related queries increased eightfold.

A classifier analyzed output artifacts: 93% of sessions produce content. The most common outputs are explanations (17%), documents and reports (15%), and instructions (11%). Claude Code sessions provide more model autonomy: the median article in Claude Code is written in a single prompt compared to 13 rounds in the standard chat interface.

Separately, data from a survey of 9,700 users shows that over one-third expect AI to handle the majority of their work tasks within a year.