Gen Z vs. the AI Boom: New Poll Finds 70% of Young Americans Distrust AI's Billionaire Leaders

The generation most expected to benefit from the AI boom is also the one most skeptical of it. A new CNBC-Generation Lab survey of 1,088 Americans aged 18 to 34, published August 13-14, 2026, paints a striking picture: young Americans hold more negative views than positive views of artificial intelligence, deeply distrust the billionaires leading the industry, and want the physical buildout of AI infrastructure — the data centers powering it — to slow down.

The findings land at an awkward moment for the AI industry. Companies are in the middle of the largest infrastructure investment cycle in the history of computing, executives describe AI as the defining opportunity of the generation, and policymakers in Washington are debating how aggressively to subsidize the buildout. Yet the demographic that will live longest with the consequences of these decisions is telling pollsters they see more threat than promise.

What the survey found

The career question produced the sharpest result: 45% of respondents said they expect AI to have a negative impact on their careers, compared with just 10% who believe it will help them. That is a 4.5-to-1 ratio of pessimism to optimism among the age group entering the workforce right now.

Distrust of the people running the industry runs even deeper. Asked about the billionaire leaders of major AI companies, roughly 70% of young respondents expressed distrust. The most striking individual number: 81% said they distrusted Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose company has become one of the most prominent faces of AI adoption in government and defense. Other major AI leaders polled nearly as poorly, with around 79% expressing distrust of at least one other prominent figure.

On infrastructure, the results break from the industry’s preferred narrative. A majority of 60% said new data center construction should be slowed down, according to coverage by Forbes and TechRadar, with only about 15% saying they wanted construction sped up. Young Americans, in other words, are not just ambivalent about AI software — they are actively uncomfortable with the acres of servers, power draw, and land use that the AI economy requires.

A separate recent Generation Lab poll adds another dimension: 27% of 18-to-34-year-olds believe they or someone they know has already lost a job because of AI. This is not abstract future anxiety — a meaningful share of the generation reports firsthand, or near-hand, experience with AI-driven job displacement.

The pessimism extends beyond AI itself. The same CNBC-Generation Lab polling cycle found young Americans broadly negative on the economy, with concerns about the cost of living, housing, and job security coloring views of every institution — tech included.

Why this matters

1. The adoption gap is a trust problem

AI companies have spent the past year racing to ship consumer products — assistants, agents, coding tools — that depend on mass adoption by exactly this age group. But adoption is downstream of trust, and trust is what this survey shows collapsing. When 45% of 18-to-34-year-olds expect AI to hurt their careers, marketing campaigns promising empowerment are working against the grain of lived perception. Products aimed at young knowledge workers will increasingly have to overcome, not assume, goodwill.

2. Infrastructure faces a political ceiling

The 60% who want data center construction slowed represent a genuine political problem for the industry’s growth model. AI’s compute requirements are doubling on aggressive timelines, and every major provider — OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, xAI — has multi-gigawatt data center projects in flight. Those projects require zoning approvals, power interconnects, water allocations, and, increasingly, state and federal incentives. A Gallup poll from May 2026 found that seven in ten Americans oppose an AI data center in their own local area. Young voters, who skew toward the Democratic party and toward environmental caution, are a key constituency in exactly the states — Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Georgia — where much of the buildout is happening.

3. Distrust of AI leadership is becoming a brand liability

The 70%-plus distrust numbers for AI’s billionaire leaders mirror a broader pattern of declining faith in tech elites. For an industry whose products make consequential decisions — what students learn, who gets a loan, what code ships to production — leadership distrust translates directly into regulatory appetite. It is no coincidence that Congress held hearings this week on rogue AI agents, or that senators are drafting open-weight incentive frameworks: policymakers read polls too, and a generation of voters that distrusts AI’s leaders is a generation that will not punish them for regulating.

4. It complicates the “AI will create jobs” argument

Industry advocates argue AI will create more jobs than it destroys, pointing to developer demand and new categories of work. The survey suggests young Americans are not convinced. With 45% expecting career harm and 27% reporting job losses they can already point to, the burden of proof has shifted. Companies and governments making the case for AI-led growth will need more than projections — they will need visible pipelines that train young workers for AI-era roles and demonstrable protections for those displaced.

The counterargument

Skeptics of the poll’s framing note that stated attitudes and actual behavior often diverge: the same generation that reports distrust of AI companies uses ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude daily, and adoption statistics among 18-to-34-year-olds remain the highest of any age group. Pessimism about “AI” in the abstract coexists with heavy use of AI tools in the concrete. There is also a well-documented pattern in technology history — from social media to smartphones — where expressed concern never translates into abandonment.

That is true, but it may miss the point. Social media’s reputational collapse among young users did not kill the products; it produced regulatory scrutiny, litigation, and a generation of politicians who made tech accountability a career-defining issue. The AI industry may be looking at the same trajectory: continued usage, eroding legitimacy.

What to watch

• Whether data center opposition materializes into actual project delays or legislative friction at the state level in late 2026.
• Whether AI companies respond with visible workforce programs, retraining commitments, or safety initiatives aimed at rebuilding trust with younger users.
• How this sentiment interacts with the 2026 midterm elections, where AI policy has become a live issue for the first time.
• Whether the “already lost a job to AI” number — currently 27% — grows over the next polling cycles, which would move the issue from perception to experience.

The AI boom is often described as a story about technology. Surveys like this one are a reminder that it is equally a story about public consent — and that consent, among the generation with the most at stake, is thinning fast.