Tech backlash fever itch as AI angst collides with social media fears

Silicon Valley’s technology leaders have long dreamed of making the world a better place. But now more than ever, Americans say they’re living in a tech-induced nightmare.

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence giants like OpenAI and Anthropic has exacerbated a deep malaise toward the tech sector, especially among people who have come to associate AI with job loss and now see outsized data centers rising up in their backyards. The last generation of technology, meanwhile, ushered in a cohort of social media apps that proved so addictive that Meta agreed to fork over up to $17 billion as part of a landmark settlement this week.

At a time of stubbornly high inflation that’s pushed consumer confidence to a seven-month low, Americans are looking up to see tech’s trillion-dollar companies getting bigger and more powerful, all while being led by some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

“If this technology takes off in the way that you see the CEOs of AI Labs talking about, we’re facing a significant impact to our economy, to people’s jobs, to their sense of agency,” Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of research firm AI Now Institute, told CNBC in an interview. “There are lots of members of the public that don’t want to see that vision roll out.”

More than half of Americans say they’re more concerned than excited about the growing use of AI in daily life, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. That’s up from 37% in 2021. And in a poll earlier this year, the Searchlight Institute found that the overwhelming majority of voters believe social media has a negative impact on society. 

Confidence in AI executives is even more dismal, according to a CNBC Generation Lab survey of 18- to 34-year-olds. More than 75% of respondents said they don’t trust Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to act responsibly, while around 70% of respondents expressed those views about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The public’s mounting disdain toward the tech sector could prove to be especially challenging for Anthropic and OpenAI, which are both valued at nearly $1 trillion and are gearing up for potentially historic IPOs. Those offerings could mint a number of fresh billionaires and scores of millionaires. AI backlash is expected to appear as a key risk factor in Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, as CNBC previously reported.

In a post on X earlier this month, Amodei acknowledged that the public has a negative view of AI, and he said Anthropic and other companies will have to deliver on their promises to improve people’s lives.

“I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust,” Amodei wrote. “I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of…