AI Governance: What Americans Really Want
Articles
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Results from Fathom’s latest polling on the public’s vision for a future with AI, and what they are willing to trade for it
Key Summary
Two years ago, Fathom first began asking the American public how they felt about artificial intelligence. We asked baseline questions: were people using AI, how were they using it, and how did they feel about it? The headline findings were stark: in each iteration of our polling, we found that people were using AI more, but remained highly ambivalent about the technology. On governance, our polling showed that the public wanted guardrails (overwhelmingly, across party lines), but had little confidence in the government or industry to deliver them.
This spring, we asked a harder question: Americans want governance, but what does the public’s preferred AI future actually look like? And what are they willing to give up to get there?
Standard opinion polling tends to surface areas of easy agreement. Ask whether child safety matters and you get near-universal support. Ask whether accountability is important and the numbers look similarly strong. But broad agreement on abstract “good AI future” principles does little to inform actual policymaking. To surface genuine preferences, we need the kind of real-world friction that real-world policy choices entail.
Our latest national survey was designed to introduce exactly that. We explored the public’s vision for the AI future they want with three different sets of questions. First, we had respondents rate twenty principles for a good future with AI: children’s safety, augmentation of human reasoning, long-term risks, based on how important they thought each one was. We then reframed these principles in terms of costs: accountability “even if this creates liability risks for companies,” verification “even if it slows innovation.” Finally, we asked respondents to make either/or choices between principles that might come at the expense of one another.
The result is a nuanced portrait of the AI future Americans want and of the tradeoffs that policymakers, candidates, and civil society will need to navigate as AI governance begins to appear on the ballot.