Americans strongly support regulations on AI

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Most Americans, even those who most appreciate artificial intelligence, strongly support more regulation of it, a new survey by Johns Hopkins University researchers finds.

Image by geralt from Pixabay

In an [article published today(https://hub.jhu.edu/2026/06/15/americans-strongly-support-regulations-on-ai/)] and signed by Jill Rosen, we can read that more than 70% of Americans want the right to interact with a human rather than an AI in medical, legal, educational, and government settings. This proposed regulation and others were endorsed across party lines and by both regular users of AI and novices.

“What was surprising to us in this new poll was that daily users of AI, and people who view AI positively, also want regulation,” said Christopher Honey, a computational cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins and a member of the university’s Data Science and AI Institute.

In April and May, more than 2,000 people in the United States were asked their views on artificial intelligence. Questions explored how people generally felt about the technology, how much they trusted it in personal and workplace settings, and about their support for new laws being considered across the country.

Americans’ overall feelings about AI are split: about one third positive, one third negative, and one third mixed. These overall attitudes varied greatly with how often people use AI: 80% of skilled daily users feel positively about AI versus 24% of people who have only tried it a few times.

Image credit: Johns Hopkins University

Younger people were more positive about AI: 41% of adults ages 18 to 29 had a positive overall view, compared with 18% of adults 60 and older. At the same time, younger people felt more pressure to use AI at work: Nearly 50% of working adults ages 18 to 29 reported feeling pressure to use AI, compared with about 20% of adults ages 60 and older.

Republicans and Democrats felt similarly about the technology.

Most Americans strongly support “right to a human” laws, which would allow them to opt out of AI interactions. People want to deal with people when it comes to medical care (79%), legal proceedings (76%), and education (74%).

Image credit: Johns Hopkins University

Americans also strongly support more rules to protect their privacy and to make AI more transparent:

75% want to be told when they’re interacting with AI
73% want to ban AI from using individuals’ faces and voices
68% want labels on AI-generated images and video

Americans trust AI for certain tasks more than others:

Look up factual information: 67% trust AI somewhat or a great deal
File taxes: 42% trust it somewhat or a great deal
Create art or music: 57% trust it somewhat or a great deal
Be a coworker: 32% trust it somewhat or a great deal
Manage retirement: 33% trust it somewhat or a great deal
Provide medical advice: 63% don’t trust it much or at all
Teach high school: 69% don’t trust it much or at all
Decide a court case: 81% don’t trust it much or at all
Drive a car: 76% don’t trust it much or at all

About six in 10 U.S. adults expect AI to widen inequality over the next decade. There was broad support for a “digital dividend,” which is a small monthly payment to every American adult that is funded by a tax on large tech companies: This was endorsed by Republicans (52%), Democrats (60%) and political independents (52%).

As AI advances, about four in 10 Americans expect the large technology companies to reap the biggest gains in power. Fewer than 1 in 10 expect individuals to gain the most power. And nearly 1 in 5 Americans think that it will be the AI systems themselves.

“We were interested to hear the national voice as the public tries to understand these problems. What are people thinking and feeling?” said Rolando Masís-Obando, a computational neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who uses AI to study how people think and remember. “We are taking the pulse of the nation with this poll, and we want to run this every year to see how opinions change over time.”

Full findings and methodology can be found at futurerealities.org. The findings will be presented and discussed at The Future of Our Realities 2026 conference on June 20 at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.

The work was supported by a Johns Hopkins University Nexus Award

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The text and information boxes belongs to Johns Hopkins University. In addition to the translation from English to Spanish, in Notaspampeanas we only added Geralt’s photography published on Pixabay.com. Thank you very much, Geralt!!!

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