45% of Americans aged 18–34 expect AI to hurt their careers. Only 10% think it’ll help. Those numbers alone would make for a rough product launch. But the CNBC/Generation Lab survey of 1,088 young adults reveals something sharper than career anxiety: when shown nine of the most powerful figures in AI, respondents didn’t trust a single one of them to act responsibly. Not one.
Nine Names, Nine Failures
Every AI executive tested scored a net-negative trust rating — and it wasn’t close.
The distrust rankings read like a leaderboard nobody wanted to top.
- Alex Karp (Palantir CEO): 81% don’t trust him — worst score on the list
- Peter Thiel (Palantir chairman): 79% distrust
- Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Sundar Pichai (Alphabet): roughly 75–76% distrust each
- Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk: approximately 70% distrust each
- Satya Nadella: the “best” score — still 65% distrust, 35% trust
That last number is worth sitting with. Nadella can’t crack net-positive trust with young Americans — the most diplomatically cautious executive on the list, and still net-negative. The Gallup data adds wider context: among adults 18–29, those reporting “no trust at all” in AI jumped from 29% to 41% in a single year. A TechRadar Pro-reported study finds AI pessimists now outnumber optimists two-to-one nationally.
Using It, Hating It
Gen Z keeps using AI while growing increasingly angry about the way it’s being deployed.
Usage remains steady — Gen Z hasn’t quit the AI tools. But the emotional picture shifted fast. Gallup tracking finds excitement about AI fell 14 percentage points in a year, hopefulness dropped nine points, and anger climbed nine points. It’s the psychological equivalent of streaming a show you resent because nothing better is on offer.
The pessimism isn’t abstract, either. According to Axios, 27% of young Americans say they or someone they know has already lost a job to AI. Among students, 65% feel bleak about the job market, and 56% specifically blame AI — per a CNBC SurveyMonkey survey of over 3,500 respondents. This stopped being hypothetical a while ago.
Who Should Actually Be in Charge
Young Americans want government and independent experts running AI oversight — not the executives currently building it.
The governance numbers are the clearest rebuke to the “trust us” messaging from tech leaders. In the CNBC/Generation Lab survey:
- 40% of young Americans want the federal government to set AI rules
- 36% prefer an independent expert body
- Only 8% say AI shouldn’t be regulated at all — suggesting near-consensus for oversight, just not the corporate kind
Young Americans aren’t calling for abolition. They’re calling for accountability. And with 55% of 18–24-year-olds telling TechRadar Pro they’d make generative AI age laws disappear if they could, the window for tech leaders to close that trust gap — on their own terms — may be closing faster than their data centers are opening.
