75% don't trust Anthropic's CEO, new survey finds

More than three in four young Americans say they don't trust Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei to act responsibly with AI, according to a new CNBC Generation Lab survey, a striking number for an industry that once branded itself as humanity's saviour.

The same survey found roughly 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds distrust OpenAI's Sam Altman and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg. Separately, Pew Research found more than half of Americans are now more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, up sharply from 37% in 2021.

Amodei himself acknowledged the problem in a recent post on X, calling it "fundamentally a crisis of trust" rooted in decades of scepticism toward big institutions, not just AI specifically.

Nowhere is the anger more visible than around data centres, the sprawling facilities powering AI models. Data Center Watch reported that $130bn worth of projects were blocked or delayed by local opposition in the first quarter alone, nearly matching the $156bn disrupted across all of 2025.

Food and Water Watch's Emily Wurth said objections span water use, rising utility bills and farmland loss, with hundreds of residents turning out to oppose projects in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Meta agreed this week to pay up to $17bn and impose new safeguards, including a default two-hour daily limit for teens on Facebook and Instagram, to settle a bipartisan lawsuit over social media's effects on young users.

Common Sense Media's Jim Steyer called it a "qualitatively different moment," describing techlash sentiment as the strongest he's seen in over two decades running the nonprofit.