Picture the most powerful lineup in technology: the CEOs of OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, Alphabet, Palantir, Anthropic, and Microsoft, plus Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, nine figures who between them have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to reshaping civilization through artificial intelligence. Now imagine presenting that lineup to the generation that will live with the consequences the longest, and watching every single one of them get voted off the island. That is, more or less, exactly what happened. The CNBC/Generation Lab survey of 1,088 young adults reveals something sharper than career anxiety: when shown nine of the most powerful figures in AI, respondents didn't trust a single one of them to act responsibly. Every AI executive tested scored a net-negative trust rating, and it wasn't close.
The poll was conducted July 29 through August 4, 2026, from a representative sample of 1,075 adults ages 18 to 34. CNBC has worked with Cyrus Beschloss, who co-founded Generation Lab, a DC research company. The specific numbers deserve to be read slowly. 81% said they distrusted Palantir CEO Alex Karp, 79% distrusted Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, 76% distrusted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, 74% distrusted Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, while around 70% said they distrusted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The person who emerged as the most trusted figure in the entire cohort was Microsoft's Satya Nadella, a man whose carefully diplomatic public persona has made him AI's friendly face. Nadella scored the highest marks with 35% saying they "trust" him, and 65% reporting they "don't trust" him. The best score in the room was still a landslide defeat.
What makes these numbers genuinely interesting, rather than just depressing for the venture-capital crowd, is the paradox sitting right beneath the surface. Despite fears of AI stealing jobs, 71% of respondents said they are as comfortable or more comfortable with AI than they were a year ago; 61% said they had used ChatGPT in the past month, while 48% reported using Gemini and 20% Claude. So young Americans are logging into these products constantly while simultaneously refusing to extend trust to the people who built them. The technology and its architects have been decoupled in the minds of its heaviest users. That is a fascinating and historically unusual posture: using the machine, distrusting the machinist.
The deeper engine driving the distrust is economic and visceral. About 45% of respondents said AI would have a negative impact on their careers, compared to 10% that said it would help them. According to Axios, 27% of young Americans say they or someone they know has already lost a job to AI; among students, 65% feel bleak about the job market, and 56% specifically blame AI, per a CNBC SurveyMonkey survey of over 3,500 respondents. This is not abstract Silicon Valley discourse. It is the lived texture of an economy in which AI-driven layoffs are a reality people are already discussing at dinner tables. And the Gallup data widens the lens further: among adults 18 to 29, those reporting "no trust at all" in AI jumped from 29% to 41% in a single year. That is not a rounding error; that is a structural shift in sentiment.
Skeptics of the poll's framing would be right to note a few things. Generation Lab focuses specifically on 18-to-34-year-olds, a cohort whose opinions, as Generation Lab CEO Cyrus Beschloss put it, are broadly sour right now. "They're kind of thumbs-down on everything, how the president's doing, how the economy's doing, both political parties," Beschloss said. The distrust of AI leaders may thus be less about AI specifically and more about a generalized institutional collapse of confidence in elites of any stripe. A YouGov survey of around 1,200 US adults found that 71% believed large technology companies and their CEOs had too much power, while just 2% believed they had too little. Still, the survey's results on governance suggest something more pointed than blanket cynicism: 40% of young Americans want the federal government to set AI rules, and only 8% say AI shouldn't be regulated at all, suggesting near-consensus for oversight, just not the corporate kind. These respondents know what they want; they just do not want the current cast of characters delivering it. Meanwhile, according to a joint poll conducted by Bentley University and Gallup, the percentage of US adults who think AI does "more harm than good" is rising, from 31% in 2025 to 39% in 2026. The trajectory is not flattening.
When the generation most fluent in a technology refuses to trust any of the people who built it, that is not a public-relations problem; it is a governance crisis with a very short fuse.