Americans to business: Take AI slow and do it right
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While the tech industry floors the pedal on AI, the U.S. public would be happy to hit the brakes.
Stunning stat: More than three-quarters of Americans (77%) want companies to create AI slowly and get it right the first time, even if that delays breakthroughs, the 2025 Axios Harris 100 poll found.
- Only 23% of Americans want companies to develop AI quickly to speed breakthroughs, even at the price of mistakes along the way.
Why it matters: CEOs, investors and tech companies have pushed the narrative of a do-or-die AI race — but most people would rather get AI right than get it first.
Between the lines: This finding is consistent across generational lines, but the margins vary.
- 91% of boomers and 77% of Gen X favor slower AI.
- That number drops to 63% for millennials — but rises again to 74% for Gen Z, the youngest and most "digital native."
The big picture: The notion of an AI "race" has shaped the new technology's development at every level.
- The leading "frontier developers" of AI — notably OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, with xAI and Meta also in the game — believe they are racing toward "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, a level of AI that surpasses human capabilities.
- AI makers broadly see themselves in a race with one another to build faster, more reliable and more efficient models.
- Every other company sees itself in a race to put AI to work in different industries.
- Nations — chiefly the U.S. and China — also imagine a race for global AI dominance.
Yes, but: All this racing has spurred investment and development, but the public hasn't yet bought into the narrative.
- For many users, AI remains a solution in search of a problem.
- Others doubt AI's world-changing promises and instead see an innovation that will kill jobs and flood the world with bad information.
💭 Our thought bubble: Sometimes public awareness of new technology simply lags reality, and AI boosters believe that's the case here.
- But the public has also now had many chances to learn from each new wave of the digital revolution of the last half-century.
- The Axios-Harris poll respondents may simply have drawn an important lesson from bitter experience with the rise of smartphones and social media over the last two decades.
That lesson is ... business-model-driven mistakes in the early phase of technology adoption are almost impossible to correct once a new platform's cement hardens.
- Moving more slowly in the early days may be the only way not to lock in choices that we regret.
Go deeper: The Axios Harris Poll 100's methodology
