CNBC poll: 81% of young Americans distrust Palantir's Karp on AI

The gap between how AI executives see themselves and how the young Americans who will actually use their products see them just got quantified. A CNBC/Generation Labs poll reported by Futurism surveyed over 1,000 US adults aged between 18 and 34 and found that 81 percent don't trust Palantir CEO Alex Karp to act responsibly on AI, followed by Peter Thiel at 79 percent, and 71, 70, and 69 percent who don't trust Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman respectively. Microsoft's Satya Nadella was the outlier, the only figure tested to land on the trust side of the ledger, at 35 percent.

The generational tell is not that any one number is high; it's the flatness of the top of the ranking. When the highest-profile AI founders all cluster within twelve points of each other in a bad direction, the survey is measuring the archetype more than the person. That fits with the article's other findings: 45 percent said AI will have a negative effect on their careers, 40 percent want the US government to regulate AI, and 60 percent said the tech industry's all-out data-center construction drive should slow down.

That last number matters for anyone underwriting the current capex cycle. The growth story leans on the idea that consumer familiarity plus enterprise adoption will pay back the buildout in land, power, and chips being staged this decade. If the cohort supposed to be the natural upside of that curve wants the buildout throttled, permitting fights in states with tight power grids get a political constituency they did not have a year ago. Nadella's outlier score hints that a corporate, less founder-forward posture reads as less threatening, a positioning Microsoft has been running with and one that OpenAI's front-of-camera CEO strategy specifically does not have. It also lands in a week when a Massachusetts DA said a teen used ChatGPT to draft murder 'fantasy stories', the kind of headline that hardens the Altman number rather than softening it.

The piece does not publish a margin of error, fieldwork dates, or partisan crosstabs, and it lists only six of the nine executives it says were tested, so the shape of the ranking below Karp and Thiel is harder to read than it looks. There is also no direct comparison against older cohorts to isolate how much of this is a generational effect versus a broader shift. Still, the polling is unusually consistent on trust, on career anxiety, and on data-center appetite: 18-34s in this survey are voting against the current pitch.

For the AI industry, that reads as a comms and recruiting problem to solve now rather than a political one to argue about later. The companies that win the next hiring cycle and the next round of local approvals will be the ones whose public face does not automatically register as the thing this cohort has already decided not to trust.