Americans Trust AI Less Than the DMV, Hope It Still Cooks Up a Cure 🧪

Nearly 52,000 Americans told Anthropic they fear artificial intelligence most for what it might take — their jobs — and trust the companies building it least among major institutions, according to the company's first "Public Record" survey conducted in late 2025. The poll of 51,993 respondents found 64% rank job loss as their top AI concern, a worry that led among Democrats at 67% and Republicans at 62% and topped the list in every state, ranging from 71% in Iowa to 57% in Mississippi. Cognitive dependency followed at 56%, with misinformation at 52%.

Trust in AI companies registered at 15%, the lowest figure for any institution Anthropic tested, below the federal government at 20%, state and local government at 19%, and international bodies at 20%, and well behind independent experts at 43%. "Americans with postgraduate degrees are nearly 10 percentage points more worried about job loss than those with a high school education or less," the survey found. "At the same time, people who use AI at work every day are notably less worried about job loss than people who don't use AI at all: 54% versus 70%."

On hopes for the technology, 48% of respondents placed curing diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer's in their top three, with helping people with disabilities next at 36%. Hopes that AI might substitute for human connection, including therapy or reducing loneliness, ranked lowest among the options presented. Support for oversight crossed party lines: 71% of Americans want government involvement in AI, including 79% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans. When asked how to keep the technology steered toward the public interest, 47% backed holding companies legally liable for harm and 44% said safety should be prioritized over growth.

The concern arrives as AI-linked US job cuts tracked 38,579 in May, roughly 40% of that month's total, and 87,714 for 2026 to date, already above the 54,836 attributed to the technology across all of 2025. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have urged Congress to protect workers, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose AI startup Prometheus raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation, pushed back on the displacement narrative. "A lot of people who, for example, today have two-earner households, perhaps one of those earners will choose not to be in the job market, so they'll become a one-earner household," Bezos said. Anthropic, which recently filed confidentially to go public, said it plans to repeat the Public Record survey and expand it beyond the United States.