The Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) is a communication policy research center at the University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1993. Its scholars study the role of communication in politics, science, adolescent behavior, child development, health care, suicide prevention, civics and mental health; it created FactCheck.org in 2003, and organizes and manages the civic-education projects Annenberg Classroom and the Civics Renewal Network. Its ongoing funding comes from an endowment established for it by the Annenberg Foundation in 1993 (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org). Since 2026 its Institutions of Democracy survey series has been a recurring source in US debates over AI regulation and data-center siting.
Institutions of Democracy survey series
APPC's Institutions of Democracy division fields a periodic national survey that has carried a battery of AI items since early 2026. Waves are conducted for APPC by SSRS, an independent research company, primarily online with a small sample of phone respondents, and are weighted to national population benchmarks (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org).
Two features distinguish the series from most published AI polling. The center releases a full weighted topline as a separate document rather than only a summary, and it prints the prior wave alongside every repeated item, so the result functions as a change measurement rather than a snapshot. Wave 38 also reports a within-person change estimate drawn from the 1,241 respondents who took both waves, alongside the wave-to-wave comparison whose independent-samples significance test the topline itself describes as conservative given that overlap (Artificial Intelligence — Topline Report (APPC W38 National Survey)).
The W38 wave was fielded June 16 to July 19, 2026 among 1,320 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of ±3.48 percentage points; the preceding W37 wave was fielded February 17 to March 20, 2026 among 1,330 adults (Artificial Intelligence — Topline Report (APPC W38 National Survey)). The topline was published August 10, 2026 and the center's summary of it on August 11, 2026 (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org).
AI findings
The finding most widely cited from the series is the movement on data-center siting. Opposition to the construction of new data centers in the respondent's own area rose from 48.9% to 60.6% between the two waves, an increase the center described as the largest shift on any AI question it had measured. Opposition crossed party lines — Democrats 69%, Republicans 54%, independents 53% — and was highest among adults under 30 at 70%, declining to 57% among those 65 and older, which APPC noted is the inverse of the usual age pattern for a new technology (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org). The figures are carried at Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics and Public Opinion on AI.
The center has emphasized that the surrounding attitudes did not move over the same period. The share expecting AI's impact on the United States over the next decade to be somewhat or very negative was 39%, statistically unchanged from the spring, and 68% continued to say the government has done "too little" to regulate AI — a position held by 80% of Democrats, 61% of independents and 58% of Republicans. APPC research analyst Shawn Patterson Jr. framed the contrast: "Americans' expectations for how AI will affect the country, and their views toward regulation, are essentially unchanged since March. Over the same period, however, opposition to a data center in their area rose 12 points" (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org).
W38 also produced a 13-area map of where the public expects AI to help or harm. Only medical research and discoveries drew a net-positive assessment, at +41 points; the most negative areas were personal privacy and data security at −63, children's safety online at −50, and employment and jobs at −46 (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org; Artificial Intelligence — Topline Report (APPC W38 National Survey)).
A further finding concerns the limits of familiarity. Among respondents who reported never using AI in the past month, 54% expected a negative national impact, falling to 40% among light users and 29% among heavy users, a gradient the center reported holds after accounting for party, age, gender, education, income, race and religion, and which tracks hands-on use rather than exposure. Data-center opposition showed no such gradient — 64% among non-users against 60% among heavy users. Matthew Levendusky, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and the Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at APPC, described the pattern as optimism with "clear limits," disappearing "when we ask about privacy, about jobs, and about whether a data center should go up nearby" (Source: annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org).
Relationships
- supports: Artificial Intelligence — Topline Report (APPC W38 National Survey) — the weighted topline for its W38 wave, the center's primary AI publication to date.
- related: Public Opinion on AI — the topic its AI battery measures.
- related: Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics — the subject of its most-cited AI finding.
- related: Pew Research Center — the other survey organization whose US AI-attitude series is tracked alongside it.
- related: AI Data Centers — the infrastructure whose local siting the series measures.