Poll finds Americans truly despise AI – even more than ICE
AI hype is still pushed everywhere in 2026 but it’s now more difficult for industry leaders to convince regular Americans that the technology is good for them. A new poll has found that people in the US hate AI even more than ICE.
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AI hype is still pushed everywhere in 2026, but it’s now more difficult for industry leaders to convince regular Americans that the technology is good for them. A new poll has found that people in the US hate AI even more than the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
According to a fresh national NBC News survey, voters are worried about AI and don’t trust either political party to handle the rapidly evolving technology.
A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite.
Just 26% of voters said they feel positively about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views. In fact, the only topics with a lower net positive rating than AI in the NBC News survey were the Democratic Party and Iran.
Even the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the militarized agency enforcing its brutal deportation program and shooting unarmed civilians, is viewed more positively, the poll found.
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Why the negativity? Well, for months now, AI is used to justify mass layoffs, especially in the tech industry, and people are naturally worried about job security when the so-called visionaries like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei publicly claim they’re confident that AI will soon replace humans in “almost everything.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman certainly didn’t help the hype, either, when he recently compared training AI to raising a child. People don’t like to be reduced to data points.
Unsurprisingly, the demographic groups with the most negative views of AI are voters ages 18-34, among whom the net favorability rating for AI is minus 44.
Recent graduates aren’t happy to see companies hiring 50% fewer college grads and saying that’s AI’s fault. A record 25% of unemployed workers had four-year college degrees in November, Bloomberg reports.
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Republican pollster Micah Roberts of Public Opinion Strategies admitted to NBC News: “There’s clearly a work component that is tied to this.”
Cost of living also matters to voters: the AI boom has already led to electricity bill hikes, and even though tech giants have pledged to shoulder the costs of the data centres, it’s unclear how such an agreement can be enforced.
And it’s not like the current administration is going to do anything about it. President Donald Trump likes AI and the money it brings so much that, in December, he signed an executive order establishing a nationwide rulebook for AI, which preempted individual states’ laws.
This favors tech companies, many of which supported Trump financially during the 2024 presidential campaign.
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