Public Opinion
7 items across 7 editions. First seen Wed 23 Sep, last seen Wed 4 Nov.
- NBC News writes of its exit poll: "Concerns about AI were also high on voters' minds: 57% said AI will do more to hurt society than help, the poll showed. A large majority, 76%, said they opposed building data centers in their communities. Voters split almost evenly over which party was better able to handle AI." The poll was conducted as voters left polling places, with additional interviews by phone, mail and online for early and mail voters.
- CNBC reports, citing AdImpact, that "campaigns and outside groups spent $173 million on ads about data centers during the 2026 general election, with the ads almost entirely negative", and that "Democratic advertisers accounted for $140 million of that spending". In Ohio, Democrats spent nearly $28 million on advertisements criticising data centres.
- Spending on the other side did not hold. CNBC's analysis of campaign finance records says Elon Musk "spent a record of at least $474 million on the midterms" and "funneled $224 million, or nearly half, into Texas alone", where Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott both lost; his America PAC spent nearly $87 million across 44 federal races, and "More than $80 million — or 93% of its spending — went toward races Republicans lost". CNBC reports OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna contributed $25 million to Leading the Future and Andreessen Horowitz another $50 million.
- Stateline, citing the NBC exit poll, reports that "56% of voters said AI and data centers played a 'crucial or major factor' in their vote for Congress". That figure does not appear in the NBC write-up we read, which carries the 57% and 76% numbers; the Musk and donor totals rest on CNBC's own analysis of FEC records.
- Apollo partner and chief economist Torsten Slok wrote on 24 October: "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493… Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493. And there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth." The productivity chart uses the San Francisco Fed's utilisation-adjusted total factor productivity series.
- Slok wrote that "mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins", and that "VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it". Two of the five charts are built on Ramp AI Index data.
- His conclusion: "the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector." He argues that even as models commoditise, converting cheap intelligence into revenue may be hard because "in business, intelligence is mostly judgment".
- The note is a daily commentary from an asset manager, not peer-reviewed research; it presents charts rather than a stated methodology or significance tests, and gives no percentage figures for the margin or revenue-per-worker gaps it describes. Apollo manages private-credit exposure to the sectors discussed.
- In a brief published 22 October, Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe of CSIS write that "only two incidents motivated by opposition to AI qualify as terrorism". Neither killed anyone, and no organisation has been tied to either.
- On 6 April 2026 in Indianapolis, gunfire struck the home of City-County Councilor Ron Gibson while he and his eight-year-old son were asleep inside, and the shooter left a note on the doorstep reading "NO DATA CENTERS". Police called the shooting targeted and the FBI joined the investigation; no arrest had been reported.
- On 10 April 2026 in San Francisco, Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, of Spring, Texas, threw a Molotov cocktail at a residence of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, setting a driveway gate on fire, then went to OpenAI's headquarters carrying kerosene and incendiary devices, struck the glass doors with a chair and told security he intended to burn the building and kill anyone inside. He was carrying a document titled "Your Last Warning" calling for killing AI company executives and investors, and has pleaded not guilty to federal explosives charges and state charges including two counts of attempted murder.
- CSIS reports that "By early September 2026, vandals had destroyed more than 240 such cameras across the country", referring to Flock Safety AI licence-plate readers, and that "Over 80 percent of Americans think AI development is moving too quickly". The brief is CSIS's own count against its own definition of terrorism; it does not report a government tally.
- Anthropic reports that 91% of its staff expect AI to be able to make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030, against 39% of US adults. The US figures come from a Morning Consult survey of 10,980 adults fielded 11 to 23 August 2026 and weighted to be nationally representative; the staff figures come from an unweighted internal poll of 1,334 respondents run 9 to 12 August 2026.
- Staff put the share of their own current work hours AI could do by 2030 at 75% on average, against 28% for US workers, and more than half of staff expect 80% or more, against 5% of US workers. Depending on the task, 19% to 40% of US adults say AI will never be able to do it, against at most 2% of staff.
- Translated into macroeconomic terms, the median US adult's answers imply 5.4% GDP growth in 2030 and the median staff member's imply 17.1%. Starting from a stated 4.2% unemployment rate, US workers who expect 80% or more of their work to be AI-doable forecast 12.2% unemployment in 2030.
- Anthropic says the staff figures are the personal expectations of staff members in an internal poll and not a company forecast or plan. The US sample was drawn from opt-in online panellists, so it excludes adults without internet access; range answers were converted to midpoints; the GDP figures use only the 3,259 US adults and 1,093 staff who answered every key question; and a September follow-up of 7,613 US adults implied 5.6% growth, but the report uses the August results.
- In a cross-sectional online survey fielded June 17 to July 26, 2024, participants chose between a fast answer from the AI within 5 minutes and waiting up to 48 hours for a health professional to review it: 748 (63.1%) preferred to wait for clinician review of medical messages, while 680 (57.4%) preferred the faster AI answer for logistical messages and 600 (50.6%) for general messages (P < .001).
- For mental-health support, 757 (63.9%) said they were most likely to use a human therapist available in 3 months, against 595 (50.2%) for therapist-monitored AI available in 1 month and 525 (44.3%) for AI alone available immediately.
- Women were less likely than men to accept AI for medical portal messages (prevalence ratio 0.76, 95% CI 0.65–0.90), and Black or African American participants were more likely than White participants (PR 1.40, 95% CI 1.20–1.64).
- The research letter was published online October 14, 2026. Of 1,237 who completed the survey, 52 (4.2%) were excluded for failed attention checks. The authors note response time is confounded with modality, the vignettes are hypothetical, and the sample is nonprobability.
- Epoch AI reports that the share of US adults saying they experienced any cyber incident in the past 12 months was 46.2% (90% CI 43.6–48.8) in the 12–14 June 2026 wave (n = 1,021) and 44.6% (42.0–47.2) in the 18–20 September 2026 wave (n = 1,024), rounded in the text to 46% and 45%.
- Among frequent AI users — daily or weekly, n = 233 in June and n = 215 in September — the figures were 53% (48–59) and 51% (45–57), also with no detectable change. All six measured incident types fell or held steady: convincing spam 32.2% to 32.1%, leaked personal information 19.8% to 18.2%, account break-ins 7.9% to 6.0%.
- This is a rare attempt to measure whether frontier model releases show up in ordinary people's experience of cybercrime. Epoch notes the June poll ran days after Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, and points to a spike in serious vulnerability disclosures in June and July — neither of which moved the self-reported rate.
- Epoch states the poll "cannot identify AI-caused incidents or estimate the effect of specific model releases". Each wave is a fresh random sample rather than a tracked panel, with only about 40 respondents in both by chance; recall windows overlap, and everything is self-reported. Absence of a detectable change over three months is not evidence of no effect.
- Gallup, in results published 22 September from research with Microsoft, reports a median of 81% awareness of AI tools and a median of 43% who have ever used AI across 37 countries and territories, from nationally representative samples of about 1,000 adults aged 15 and over in each, surveyed April to July 2026, with margins of error from ±2.2 to ±4.9 percentage points.
- On optimism that AI will mostly help their country, Gallup reports 93% in China and 91% in Vietnam against 36% in the United States, 35% in Egypt and 34% in Bangladesh. Across all 37, a median of 72% reported at least one positive emotion about AI and 41% at least one negative emotion.
- Negative emotions outweighed positive ones in only three of the 37 countries: "the United States, Egypt and the State of Palestine". 404 Media, reporting the same research, quotes Gallup senior scientist Pablo Diego-Rosell placing the Netherlands, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Ireland and Malta near the top on worry — a pattern Gallup frames as wealthy, high-adoption countries being the most concerned.
- This is the first 37 of a planned 140 countries, so the medians will move as fieldwork continues. Microsoft is a co-sponsor of the research, and self-reported use is not measured use.