AI-enabled military systems are a fixture of modern military conflict. Applications vary from autonomous drones for surveillance and attack to AI-supported target selection. The importance of AI for modern conflict shows also in public disputes between governments and technology companies over the conditions for military access to frontier AI. Both military uses and government attempts at enabling and steering them happen before a backdrop of public opinion, yet we still know little about how people think about military AI. Drawing on a preregistered survey of 9,000 respondents in nine countries, including China, Germany, and the United States, we examine whether support for military AI is shaped primarily by general attitudes toward AI, principled opposition to lethal autonomy, or foreign-policy and geopolitical orientations. Across six military AI scenarios that vary in lethality and human control, respondents who view AI as beneficial are substantially more supportive of military AI. Hawkish respondents are also more supportive. By contrast, principled opposition to lethal autonomy is not broadly associated with the full index but is related to the application of fully autonomous lethal force. Contrary to our expectation, perceived AI risks are positively associated with support. Cross-national differences are moderate and broadly consistent with geopolitical context. Overall, public opinion toward military AI appears conditionally permissive. Publics are not categorically opposed to various military uses of AI. Instead, unease is concentrated around fully autonomous lethal force.
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more common in our daily lives, it is important to understand how different stakeholders comprehend and envisage the role that these technologies play in shaping social, political, and economic realities. In this paper, we investigate public perceptions of AI based on a corpus of letters submitted during the public consultation for the Trump Administration's US AI Action Plan. To this aim, we release a corpus cleaning pipeline and perform topic modelling and frequency analysis to explore predominant topics discussed by different subgroups (e.g., academia, individuals, private sector) and those appearing in the AI Action Plan. Our results show that individuals voice strong concerns related to the impact of AI on life, while other stakeholders are more concerned with AI development. Our comparison of topics suggests that the AI Action Plan reflects predominantly the concerns of the private sector on security, policies, and development, with individuals' concerns less represented.
Alina Karakanta, Alex Christiansen, Tomás Dodds +4
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming economies, societies, and polities, raising fundamental questions about how it should be regulated. Policymakers face choices over whether to prioritize innovation or safety, rely on public oversight or private self-regulation, and govern nationally or internationally. Yet little is known about how citizens evaluate these competing priorities. Here we report a conjoint survey experiment conducted in seven countries with diverse political and economic profiles. We find that citizens strongly support regulating AI and generally prioritize safety over innovation, public governance over private self-regulation, and international over national approaches. The preference for safety is strongest among those who perceive AI as risky, unpredictable, and personally consequential. These findings reveal a systematic misalignment between dominant regulatory approaches and citizen preferences.
Public discourse and emerging policy typically assume that AI emotional support is a deliberate act: a lonely user consciously seeking comfort from a dedicated companion chatbot. In this paper, we draw on emerging empirical evidence and argue that this picture is inaccurate on two accounts, both in how AI emotional support arises and how it shapes future behavior. First, AI emotional support commonly emerges incidentally within task-oriented interactions on general-purpose platforms, much as workplace friendships deepen through collaboration. Second, these incidental encounters are path-dependent: positive experiences of AI emotional support update people's beliefs about AI's emotional capabilities and redirect their choices for future emotional support, increasing preference for AI and decreasing preference for humans. We review recent evidence, including a large-scale longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with OpenAI, showing that daily five-minute conversations with an AI about personal issues over 28 days led to a 10.3% decrease in the preference for seeking support from humans and an 11.6% increase in the preference for AI. These findings suggest that current policy, focused on companion apps and isolated interactions, cannot adequately protect human connection. Instead, effective regulations should extend to general-purpose AI systems and address cumulative, trajectory-level changes in how people seek support. Recognizing how people stumble into AI emotional support and how those encounters redirect human connections over time is essential to safeguarding human well-being.