By Priya C. Kumar
Publication Date: 2026-05-19 12:24:00
Anthropic, the company behind the generative AI tool Claude, claimed in March 2026 that it had used an AI interviewer to conduct “the largest and most multilingual qualitative study” ever. The AI tool collected responses from nearly 81,000 people about their visions for AI in 70 languages and 159 countries. Anthropic claims that tools like this can allow researchers to conduct “extensive, open-ended interviews on a very large scale.”
Qualitative research is useful for understanding people’s lived experiences. “Qualitative” refers to both the type of data researchers collect and the purpose of conducting a study. Qualitative data includes text, images, audio, video, and anything that isn’t a number. For this reason, the term “qualitative” is often discussed in contrast to “quantitative” – i.e. numerical – data.
Qualitative research allows researchers to explore in depth the tensions, ambiguities and paradoxes that characterize it.
