"wantin' ain't gettin'": you might find productivity more important, but they didn't sign up for that.

They define primitives as "simple, foundational measures of how Claude is used". They're not signing up to measure productivity, which would combine usage with displacement, work factoring, and a whole host of things outside their data pool.

What's the point? They're offering details on usage patterns relative to demographics that can help people assessing Anthropic's business and the utility of LLM-based AI. Notably, tasks and usage are concentrated in some industries (notably software) and localities (mainly correlated with GDP and the Gini index). This enables readers to project how much usage growth can be expected.

As far as I know, no one publicly offers this level of data on their emerging businesses - not google, ebay, apple, microsoft, amazon, nvidia or any of the many companies that have reshaped our technical and economic landscape in the last 30 years.

Normally we measure value with price and overall market (productivity gains is but one way that clients can recoup their price paid). But during this the build-out of AI, investors (of all stripes) are subsidizing costs to get share, so until we have stable competitive markets for AI services, value is an open question.

But it's clear some businesses feel that AI could be a strategic benefit, and they don't want to be left behind. So there is a stampede, as reflected in the neck-and-neck utilization of chat vs API.