Close to half in new poll have negative view of AI

Almost half of American voters have a negative view of artificial intelligence (AI), according to a new poll.

In the NBC News poll released Tuesday, 46 percent of respondents said they had a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” view of AI. Twenty-seven percent said they were “neutral” towards the technology and 26 percent said they had a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” view of it.

As AI has advanced in recent years, there have been questions about how it will affect the job market, the value of human work, its environmental effects and the safety parameters of the technology.

AI company Anthropic recently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration going against a decision from the Pentagon to label the company and its products as a “supply chain risk” following negotiations about safety guardrails falling through in early March.

Anthropic and the U.S. government had been fighting for weeks before the suit because of  Anthropic’s AI policy preventing its model Claude from being used for mass surveillance or creating lethal autonomous weapons.

The NBC News poll took place from Feb. 27 to March 3, featured 1,000 registered voters and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.