Despite rapid technological progress, AI has still not won the hearts of people. A new survey by the Pew Research Center shows that 52% of Americans are now more likely to feel anxiety than excitement about the growing presence of AI in daily life — a sharp increase from 37% in 2021. Only 9% feel more excitement than anxiety, while the remaining 37% are equally torn between these two feelings. This concern is even more pronounced among the younger generation. For the first time since Pew began asking this question, 55% of adults under 30 say they are more worried about AI than inspired by it, meaning it is now a majority. The growing caution extends not only to the technology itself but also to the people who create it. In a CNBC Generation Lab survey, 1,088 respondents were asked if they trust the nine most prominent industry leaders to act responsibly, and it turned out that most do not trust any of them. The best-rated was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, but even he is not trusted by 65% of respondents. The worst off was Palantir CEO Alex Karp: 81% do not trust him. Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Sundar Pichai from Alphabet fared only slightly better: about 75% of respondents said they do not trust them either. Only 36% believe that rules for AI should be set by an independent expert body. ## ## More Europeans Fear AI Will Take Their Jobs Similar anxieties are observed on the other side of the Atlantic. According to an EY study from 2025, 42% of European employees fear that AI could threaten their jobs, while a broader survey by Verian Group for the European Commission showed that 66% of Europeans believe that AI will ultimately destroy more jobs than it creates. However, the picture does not look entirely bleak: half of the Europeans surveyed by Verian agree that AI can help tackle major global challenges — from serious diseases to climate change. Opinions on the broader impact of technology are also divided: 55% of EU citizens expect AI to positively change everyday life in the next 20 years, while 35% predict the opposite. Europeans also almost unanimously support stricter controls: 84% believe that AI and robots need to be closely regulated, primarily to protect privacy and ensure transparency. At the same time, a majority still view the use of AI in the workplace positively: 62% rate its presence favorably, compared to 32% who have a negative outlook. Such caution may partly be explained by a lack of information. More than 60% of Europeans say they do not feel informed about the potential risks of using AI in research. Taken together, this data shows that Europeans are somewhat more open to AI than Americans, but they more frequently demand regulation and protective mechanisms. In the U.S., on the other hand, the expansion of AI applications faces a different kind of resistance. Plans to build new data centers for AI across the country are met with serious public discontent, even where developers offer incentives such as job guarantees. Much of this rejection is linked to a simple mismatch of expectations: many users do not see an obvious personal benefit from the infrastructure that is growing up around them. For a long time, AI was perceived as something specialized and useful — a search tool, a chatbot. Now it is appearing everywhere: in televisions, video services, email, music, school assignments, and much more. And for many, the experience of encountering this expansion is rather negative: whether it is students using AI to cheat or artists seeing their works included in training datasets without consent.
