China is eclipsing the United States as the perceived artificial intelligence superpower in much of the world, according to a new global poll that underscores how Silicon Valley’s lead in the defining technology race is no longer taken for granted.
The survey also calls into question whether the United States will continue advancing the AI frontier fast enough to stay ahead of China, finding that Americans are increasingly worried about the technology’s consumption of resources, its ability to automate jobs and its potential to sow misinformation online.
The poll, conducted by U.K.-based research firm Public First surveying over 18,000 people across 15 countries, shows that just over half of American respondents — as well as majorities of people responding in Japan, India and Vietnam — still see the U.S. as the dominant AI superpower.
But those in the 11 other countries, including close U.S. allies such as France, Canada and the United Kingdom, see China as the leader. In Germany, only 23 percent of people saw the U.S. as dominant.
The polling firm has no connection to Public First Action, a political group backed by the AI company Anthropic.
China is a major focus for lawmakers in Washington grappling with how much federal oversight AI should face. Too much regulation, and America may stifle innovation and fall behind its rival. Too little, and it may wreak havoc on civil society.
“We are leading China by a lot,” President Donald Trump said Wednesday. “Whoever leads that is going to really lead the world, to a large extent.”
Former White House AI czar David Sacks has cautioned against overregulation of the technology, including the idea of creating a clearance process for cutting-edge models that mirrors the Food and Drug Administration’s drug-review protocol. “If you try to have an FDA for AI and there are some people who want to go that far, then I think we could lose this AI race to China,” he said on Fox Business last week — barely a month after one top White House economic adviser had told the network that the administration was indeed considering a pre-release safety testing regime akin to the approval process for pharmaceuticals.
The survey suggests that people not only view the United States as falling behind China, but that it may also lack the unified public appetite to charge ahead.
Each year from 2024 to 2026, Public First asked respondents to choose whether AI would make things better or worse for themselves, society generally and the next generation. Respondents to this year’s poll offered more pessimistic answers.
In 2024, 39 percent of U.S. survey participants said AI would make things better for society while 34 percent said it would make things worse. In 2025, this ticked up to 40 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, this year only 31 percent believed AI would make society better, and 40 percent took the opposite outlook.
Confidence that AI will improve respondents’ personal lives has fallen sharply from a net positive 15 points in 2024 to just 5 points this year. Prospects for the next generation have deteriorated even further, swinging from a net positive 10 points to a net negative 4 points.
This trend is most pronounced among American respondents aged 18 to 24. This group believed that AI was going to improve society by a 4-point margin in 2025. But a year later, that plummeted, with young Americans believing AI would be worse for society by a 13-point margin. Young respondents in the U.K. mirrored these results.
In other countries, including Singapore and India, there is a widespread and persistent belief that AI will positively impact society.
In the United States, worries about misinformation, deepfakes and job loss topped the list of Americans’ concerns about the new technology.
Social media companies have been reckoning with a barrage of AI-generated content that can be created at unprecedented speeds.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described AI as the next leap forward in the evolution of his platforms. “Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all the creator content,” he said on an October earnings call. “Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we’re going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those.”
Meanwhile, young adults view the labor market with anxiety amid cataclysmic predictions from top AI executives that new models could automate a significant portion of entry-level, white-collar jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI will be able to eliminate half of these jobs in the next one to five years.
The poll indicates that fears about resource usage, including electricity, have also skyrocketed. In 2024, only 52 percent said they were worried. In 2026, that number rose to two of every three respondents.
Local backlash against data centers, which boast copious energy consumption and often rely on water-based cooling systems, has rattled elected officials. In one Missouri town, half of the city council was voted out after approving a $6 billion data center. A week after a rezoning plan was approved to accommodate a data center developer’s project, a councilman in Indianapolis said his home was shot at, and a note reading “NO DATA CENTERS” was left on his front porch.
In March, Trump issued a “ratepayer protection pledge” asking major technology companies to provide or pay for their own electricity supplies as they rapidly establish computing hubs across the country.
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