China is eclipsing the United States as the perceived artificial intelligence superpower in much of the world, according to a new global poll that also found Americans increasingly worried about the technology’s consumption of resources, its ability to automate jobs and its potential to sow misinformation online. The survey, conducted by U.K.-based research firm Public First and surveying over 18,000 people across 15 countries, shows a world being asked to live under the decisions of rival power blocs while ordinary people absorb the risks.
Who Gets to Call the Shots
Just over half of American respondents, as well as majorities of people responding in Japan, India and Vietnam, still see the U.S. as the dominant AI superpower. But respondents in the 11 other countries, including close U.S. allies such as France, Canada and the United Kingdom, see China as the leader. In Germany, only 23 percent of people saw the U.S. as dominant. The poll’s geography reads like a map of competing hierarchies, with the public left to rank which empire gets to dominate the next layer of digital life.
The polling firm has no connection to Public First Action, a political group backed by the AI company Anthropic. The survey also called into question whether the United States will continue advancing the AI frontier fast enough to stay ahead of China. President Donald Trump said Wednesday, “We are leading China by a lot. Whoever leads that is going to really lead the world, to a large extent.” Former White House AI czar David Sacks has cautioned against overregulation of the technology, including the idea of creating a clearance process for cutting-edge models that mirrors the Food and Drug Administration’s drug-review protocol. Sacks said on Fox Business last week, “If you try to have an FDA for AI and there are some people who want to go that far, then I think we could lose this AI race to China.”
What People Think AI Will Do to Them
Public First asked respondents each year from 2024 to 2026 to choose whether AI would make things better or worse for themselves, society generally and the next generation. This year’s poll showed more pessimistic answers. In 2024, 39 percent of U.S. survey participants said AI would make things better for society while 34 percent said it would make things worse. In 2025, that ticked up to 40 percent and 36 percent, respectively. This year, 31 percent believed AI would make society better and 40 percent took the opposite outlook. Confidence that AI will improve respondents’ personal lives fell from a net positive 15 points in 2024 to 5 points this year. Prospects for the next generation deteriorated from a net positive 10 points to a net negative 4 points.
The trend was most pronounced among American respondents aged 18 to 24. That group believed in 2025 that AI was going to improve society by a 4-point margin, but a year later that plummeted, with young Americans believing AI would be worse for society by a 13-point margin. Young respondents in the United Kingdom mirrored those results. In other countries, including Singapore and India, there was a widespread and persistent belief that AI would positively impact society.
The Costs Land Below
In the United States, worries about misinformation, deepfakes and job loss topped the list of Americans’ concerns about the new technology. Social media companies have been reckoning with a barrage of AI-generated content that can be created at unprecedented speeds. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an October earnings call, “Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we’re going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those.”
Young adults also viewed the labor market with anxiety amid predictions from top AI executives that new models could automate a significant portion of entry-level, white-collar jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI will be able to eliminate half of these jobs in the next one to five years. The poll also found that fears about resource usage, including electricity, had risen sharply. In 2024, only 52 percent said they were worried. In 2026, that number rose to two of every three respondents.
Local backlash against data centers, which use large amounts of energy and often rely on water-based cooling systems, has rattled elected officials. In one Missouri town, half of the city council was voted out after approving a $6 billion data center. A week after a rezoning plan was approved to accommodate a data center developer’s project, a councilman in Indianapolis said his home was shot at, and a note reading “NO DATA CENTERS” was left on his front porch. In March, Trump issued a “ratepayer protection pledge” asking major technology companies to provide or pay for their own electricity supplies as they rapidly establish computing hubs across the country.
The poll’s numbers show a public increasingly forced to weigh the promises of AI against the costs pushed downward: jobs threatened, misinformation multiplied, electricity demanded, and water-intensive infrastructure expanded. The people asked to live with the consequences are the same ones being told the race must continue.