Nearly half of Americans now hold negative views about artificial intelligence, according to a new NBC poll that reveals AI has become one of the most unpopular concepts in American politics—less popular than ICE and only slightly more popular than the Democratic Party.
The numbers are stark. 46% of registered voters expressed negative feelings toward AI, while only 26% reported positive views and 27% remained neutral. That makes AI significantly less popular than Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that's been the subject of intense political controversy for years.
But here's where it gets interesting. The same poll revealed a striking contradiction: 57% of respondents said AI's risks outweigh its benefits. Yet among those same people, AI platform usage actually rose from 48% in December 2025 to 56% in March 2026.
We say we hate it. We say it's dangerous. And then we use it more.
Having watched the tech industry navigate multiple hype cycles, I recognize this pattern. It's not cognitive dissonance—it's the early phase of a technology that's useful enough to be adopted but not trusted enough to be embraced. People used Facebook while simultaneously worrying about privacy. They bought Alexa while joking about Amazon listening to their conversations.
The difference with AI is the stakes. The poll respondents aren't worried about abstract threats. They're concerned about job displacement, particularly in white-collar sectors that previously felt immune to automation. They've read stories about chatbots inciting violence or promoting self-harm. They're watching AI expand into surveillance and military applications. And they're paying attention to the massive environmental costs of the data center buildout required to power these systems.
These aren't hypothetical concerns. They're real issues that the industry has largely treated as problems to solve later, after achieving scale.
The timing of this poll is significant. AI is becoming a major issue in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, yet it remains largely unregulated at the federal level. The technology has advanced faster than the policy frameworks designed to govern it—a pattern I saw repeatedly during my time building a fintech startup, where we often had to navigate gray areas in financial regulation.
