A new survey of more than 1,000 young American adults has delivered a striking verdict on the executives running the AI industry: across nine prominent tech leaders polled, distrust is so widespread that even the industry's data centers — increasingly the target of community backlash — score better with 18-to-34-year-olds than the CEOs themselves.
The survey, conducted by CNBC's Generation Labs, asked respondents aged 18 to 34 about politics, AI, and the economy. Its findings on tech leadership, first highlighted by Futurism, paint a picture of a generation that has thoroughly soured on the people building the AI economy — even as it holds more ambivalent views about the technology. For more context on this story, see our ongoing more AI stories.
The Trust Rankings: Dismal Across the Board
Asked "who do you trust to act responsibly on AI?", the vast majority of participants said they don't trust any of the nine executives on the list.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp fared worst, with 81 percent of respondents saying they don't trust him to act responsibly on AI. Peter Thiel was close behind at 79 percent distrust.
The heads of the biggest AI companies fared barely better. Mark Zuckerberg drew 71 percent distrust, Elon Musk 70 percent, and OpenAI's Sam Altman 69 percent.
Microsoft's Satya Nadella was the relative winner — and even he managed only a 35 percent trust score. When the best-performing executive in a nine-person field is trusted by barely a third of respondents, the overall picture is hard to mistake: this is not skepticism of one controversial founder, it is a generational verdict on an entire leadership class.
Young Adults Fear AI's Career Impact
The poll's findings on the technology itself were marginally kinder — but still broadly negative.
Asked what kind of impact AI will have on their lives, 45 percent of respondents said they expect it to negatively affect their careers. For a cohort that entered the workforce through a pandemic, a tech layoff wave, and now an AI disruption cycle, wariness about being automated out of a job is perhaps unsurprising — but the intensity is notable.
That anxiety feeds directly into policy preferences: 40 percent of those surveyed said the U.S. government should regulate AI, one of the strongest signals in the poll for where young voters want Washington to go.
On infrastructure, 60 percent said the tech industry's all-out data center construction drive should slow down — a finding that tracks with community pushback against the power and water footprints of the massive facilities cropping up across the country.
As Futurism noted, the differing question formats make direct comparison imprecise. But it is nonetheless remarkable that data centers — arguably the least beloved physical artifact of the AI boom — are less unpopular with young Americans than the billionaires underwriting them.
A Decade of Collapse in Tech's Reputation
The generational shift is the story within the story. Ten years ago, young adults were flocking to vaunted tech giants like Google and Apple in pursuit of cutting-edge careers, and tech founders ranked among the most admired figures in American business.
The 2026 numbers reflect what a decade of privacy scandals, platform decay, and mounting concerns about technology's effect on democracy has done to that reputation. Futurism attributed the collapse to concerns around data privacy, the purposeful degradation of once-useful platforms, and the erosion of democratic norms — with AI now serving as the lightning rod for all of it.
Why It Matters
For the AI industry, the poll is more than a public-relations headache. The 18-to-34 cohort is the demographic most likely to use AI products daily — and the one whose trust companies most need to convert into paying customers over multi-decade horizons. Distrust at these levels complicates everything from product adoption to talent recruitment at a moment when labs are competing fiercely for both.
For politicians, the numbers are a signal. A generation that distrusts AI executives by wide margins, expects harm to its career prospects, and wants regulation is a generation that will vote on this issue. With 40 percent already favoring government action — and midterms approaching — the political market for AI oversight is likely to grow, not shrink.
And for the executives themselves, the survey poses an uncomfortable question. The technology they build is trusted more than they are. In an industry that sells itself on solving trust problems with engineering, the most serious trust problem may be the one sitting in the executive suite.
The Irony at the Heart of the Numbers
Buried in the results is a finding that should unsettle every AI communications team: the technology itself outperforms its leadership. Respondents who said they expect AI to harm their careers still did not extend that distrust evenly — the aversion concentrated on the humans at the top.
That inversion is historically unusual. In previous technology cycles, public frustration typically attached to the product — social media addiction, phone distraction, screen time — while founders retained a sheen of visionary credibility. The 2026 pattern reverses the formula: young adults use AI tools daily, worry about them moderately, and reserve their sharpest disapproval for the executives promising to reshape civilization while doing it.
Part of the explanation may be visibility. The past year has seen AI leaders make sweeping public claims — from curing cancer to replacing entire professions — while their companies raised prices, tightened model access, or pursued controversial training-data practices. For a generation watching these announcements from the client side of a student loan, the gap between promise and lived experience has apparently compounded into something close to contempt.
What Comes Next
The survey is a snapshot, not a permanent condition. Trust can be rebuilt, and AI adoption among young adults remains high even where distrust of its makers peaks. But rebuilding it will require the industry to do the one thing the poll suggests it has avoided: demonstrating responsible behavior rather than describing it.
Until then, the most valuable asset in AI may not be compute, models, or even capital. It may be credibility — and on the evidence of this poll, nearly every major AI executive is running a deficit.
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