MIT, Stanford and 12 institutions launch Public AI Observatory to measure real AI use

yuntiandeng · x · 2026-08-19

Researchers across MIT, Stanford and 12 academic institutions launched the Public AI Observatory, public infrastructure for measuring how people actually use AI assistants in the wild.

Motivation: frontier labs' usage reports are coarse and proprietary, offering little insight into AI's impacts and natural usage patterns.

Questions it addresses: whether models refuse requests at different rates, whether illicit-content generation is rising or falling, and which models people turn to for coding versus role-play.

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