American AI Sentiment in 2026 is the second annual report on U.S. public opinion about artificial intelligence produced by Gallup, Inc. and the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). The 12-page PDF is hosted on SCSP's website, dated September 15, 2026 in its file name, and copyrighted to Gallup (Source: scsp.ai). SCSP announced it in a press release of September 16, 2026 under the title Looking to the Future: American Priorities for AI in 2026, describing it as "the second annual study tracking U.S. attitudes toward AI" (Source: prnewswire.com).
The report compares most of its measures against the first instalment, Reward, Risk, and Regulation (2025). Its summary finding is that Americans' "use of and familiarity with AI have grown, but their trust has not," that optimism about AI's economic impact has fallen, particularly among younger adults, and that on policy the public prefers expanding AI education and workplace training and strengthening safety and independent oversight over speed of development.
Method
The study is a Gallup Panel web survey of 3,152 U.S. adults aged 18 and older, conducted June 2–23, 2026. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based longitudinal panel recruited through random-digit-dial telephone interviews covering landlines and cellphones and through address-based sampling; the report states that it "is not an opt-in panel." The sample was weighted to be demographically representative of the U.S. adult population using the most recent Current Population Survey figures. The margin of sampling error at the 95% confidence level is ±1.9 percentage points for results around 50% and ±1.2 points for results around 10% or 90%, design effect included, and larger for subsamples.
The 2025 comparison wave surveyed 3,128 adults on the same panel from April 25 to May 5, 2025, with a margin of error of ±2.1 points (Reward, Risk, and Regulation: American Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence (Gallup and SCSP, 2025)). Two of the 2026 items (who should create AI rules, and who should test AI safety) allowed respondents to select more than one option, so their percentages do not sum to 100.
Use, knowledge and trust
| Measure | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Use AI always, often or sometimes at work or school and/or in personal life | 39% | 51% |
| Very or somewhat knowledgeable about AI | 60% | 68% |
| Fully or somewhat trust AI to make fair, unbiased decisions | 32% | 28% |
Reported use rose 12 percentage points, with the increase concentrated among adults 30 and older: use rose 16 points among those aged 30–39, 13 points among those 40–64 and 16 points among those 65 and older, against 5 points among adults 18–29, whom the report describes as already the earliest and heaviest adopters. Self-reported knowledge also rose more among older adults. The share of adults 65 and older describing themselves as somewhat or very knowledgeable rose 14 points to 52%, while adults 18–29 rose 7 points to 80%. The report cites Gallup's quarterly workforce study as consistent with the rise in use: 50% of employed U.S. adults said they used AI in their role at least a few times a year in the first quarter of 2026, 10 points more than in the second quarter of 2025.
On trust, the report states that "trust in AI has not increased." It describes the 28% of adults who fully or somewhat trust AI to make fair and unbiased decisions as "broadly in line with the 32% who said the same in 2025," and its conclusion characterizes trust as "stable and low." The report does not describe the four-point difference as a decline and does not report a significance test for it. Sixty-five percent distrust AI, more than twice the share who trust it, and the share who fully trust AI remained at 2%.
The report identifies use as the clearest differentiator of trust. Among adults who use AI sometimes or more, 43% trust it (46% in 2025); among those who use it rarely or never, 12% trust it (23% in 2025). The report explains the flat overall figure as a composition effect: the growing share of regular users, who trust AI more, was offset by trust among infrequent users that "roughly halved."
Asked what would increase their trust in AI, respondents gave no single answer majority support. Three measures drew similar levels: greater transparency from companies about how AI makes decisions (49%), testing of AI by independent experts (48%), and testing AI systems for fairness before they are deployed to the public (46%).
Economic expectations
| Expected effect of AI | 2025 increase | 2025 decrease | 2026 increase | 2026 decrease |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. economic growth (boost / reduce) | 53% | 24% | 36% | 45% |
| Workplace productivity | 62% | 23% | 52% | 31% |
| Number of businesses over 10 years (create more / destroy more) | 19% | 47% | 14% | 59% |
| Number of jobs over 10 years (create more / destroy more) | 12% | 61% | 9% | 70% |
More adults now expect AI to reduce U.S. economic growth (45%) than to boost it (36%), which the report calls a reversal from 2025, when more than twice as many held the positive view. The shares expecting AI to destroy more businesses and more jobs than it creates over the next decade rose by what the report describes as roughly 10 points each. Workplace productivity is the one area in which a majority (52%) remained optimistic, though the gap between positive and negative expectations narrowed. Only 20% of adults expect that most or all workers whose jobs are replaced by AI will be able to learn new skills in a different type of work.
Pessimism about growth is greatest among the young. Adults aged 18–29 expect AI to reduce rather than boost growth by 57% to 26%; adults 65 and older are the only age group in which more expect a boost (46%) than a reduction (33%). The report concludes that "higher use of and knowledge about AI tools are not associated with more positive sentiment toward it," and that economic pessimism is concentrated among younger adults, "the group that adopted AI earliest."
Learning and training
More than twice as many adults have asked an AI for help with using AI (57%) as have asked another person (23%). Twenty-six percent have used online AI training videos or articles, 16% have completed employer-provided training, 9% other courses or certification programs, and 5% vocational or technical school programs.
| Proposal | Strongly oppose | Somewhat oppose | Somewhat support | Strongly support | Don't know |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Promoting STEM education so workers are prepared to use AI in future jobs | 8% | 10% | 39% | 33% | 10% |
| Creating on-the-job training programs that teach workers AI skills | 13% | 12% | 43% | 23% | 9% |
| Teaching AI skills in core K-12 classes like math or reading | 27% | 17% | 31% | 14% | 11% |
Support totals 72% for STEM promotion and 66% for on-the-job training. Adults split 45% to 44% on teaching AI skills in core K-12 classes, with more strongly opposed (27%) than strongly supportive (14%). The report states that the three education and training proposals draw similar support across party lines, "one of the few areas of bipartisan AI policy consensus in the survey."
Partisan differences
The report finds that other policies divide by party, and that the direction depends on the proposal "rather than follow a single consistent ideological line." Republicans were more supportive than Democrats of mandatory age verification requirements in general (a gap of 8 points), age verification using AI in websites and apps (12 points), expanding AI in manufacturing (12 points), increasing energy production for AI systems (16 points), and reducing AI-related regulation (11 points). The report links this pattern to the partisan divide on AI's economic impact, where Republicans tend to be more positive than Democrats and independents. Democrats were more supportive of increasing government funding for AI research at colleges and universities (54%, against 46% of independents and 44% of Republicans). Support for allowing companies or universities to use government resources for their own AI research was similar across parties.
The report also carries an 11-row chart of support by party. As extracted from the PDF's text layer, its values do not reconcile with the prose: the university-funding row reads 54, 46 and 44 under the headings Republican, Democrat and Independent, where the prose assigns 54% to Democrats and 44% to Republicans, and the values in every row fall in descending order, which suggests the extraction preserves position rather than party. Party-level figures are given here only where the report's prose states them.
Regulation, oversight and safety testing
Seventy-nine percent of adults say the government should prioritize maintaining safety and data security rules even if that slows AI development, against 7% who prioritize speed. The report states that this is "unchanged from 2025 and holds across partisan lines"; the 2025 wave recorded 80% and 9% (Source: news.gallup.com).
| Who should create AI safety and security rules for private developers (multiple answers allowed) | 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| The U.S. government | 60% | 54% |
| Companies working together on a shared set of rules | 50% | 53% |
| Each company, its own rules | 17% | 16% |
| Something else | 15% | — |
| No rules or regulations | 2% | — |
| Who should test and evaluate the safety and security of new AI before wide use (multiple answers allowed) | 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Independent experts | 75% | 72% |
| The U.S. government or government agencies | 52% | 48% |
| Each company, its own tests | 35% | 37% |
| Something else | 6% | — |
| No tests or evaluations | 2% | — |
The 2025 figures in both tables come from Gallup's September 16, 2025 news release on the first wave, which was not part of the 2025 report (Source: news.gallup.com). The 2026 report presents its own figures without comparison to them, apart from the safety-versus-speed item.
On the balance between government and industry, 42% say the U.S. government and businesses should have equal influence in developing AI, against 24% who say the government should have more and 18% who say businesses should.
Conclusions and statements on release
The report's conclusion states that greater familiarity "has not generated greater trust," that economic pessimism is rising, and that education and workplace training, "a shared preference for safety-first regulation and oversight by independent experts" represent "the clearest points of common ground across the political spectrum."
In SCSP's press release, SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari said Republicans, Democrats and independents "want the same things," listing STEM teaching, on-the-job training, safety and security ahead of speed, and independent testing before the public depends on AI systems, and argued that America's competitive edge "will not come from adoption alone." Gallup principal Justin Lall said the public is becoming more experienced with AI while becoming more cautious about its economic implications, which makes workforce preparation more important (Source: prnewswire.com).
Figures that differ across documents
- Press release figures. SCSP's press release gives a 12-point partisan gap on "mandatory age-verification requirements" and 55% Democratic support for university research funding. The report gives an 8-point gap for age verification in general, a 12-point gap for AI-based age verification, and 54% (Source: prnewswire.com).
- 2025 trust baseline. The 2025 report gives trust as 2% fully and 29% somewhat, a total of 31%; the 2026 report gives the 2025 figure as 32%. Neither document explains the difference, which is consistent with rounding.
Provenance
The text was captured in full from the PDF on SCSP's website on September 17, 2026, with chart data carried as rendered by the PDF text layer. The executive summary describes the sample as "more than 3,000 U.S. adults" surveyed "in June 2026"; the exact figures above are from the methodology section.
Relationships
- instance-of: Public Opinion on AI — the second wave of an annual U.S. opinion series.
- depends-on: Reward, Risk, and Regulation: American Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence (Gallup and SCSP, 2025) — the first instalment, against which most 2026 measures are compared.
- supports: AI Labor Disruption — 70% expect AI to destroy more jobs than it creates over the next decade.
- related: AI Pre-Release Vetting, Independent Verification Organizations (IVOs) — 75% want independent experts to test AI safety before wide use.
- related: Age Verification, AI in Education — partisan split on age verification; bipartisan support for STEM and workplace training.
- related: Gallup, Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) — co-producers.