Doug Henwood, who has been writing about American capitalism from the left since he founded Left Business Observer in 1986, put four words above a Futurism headline on Sunday night: "The kids are alright." The piece he linked was headlined "Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe", and for once the copy wasn't doing the heavy lifting. The numbers underneath are worse than the verb.

CNBC and Generation Lab polled 1,088 Americans between 18 and 34 earlier this month, margin of error 2.97 points, and read them nine names from the AI industry with one question attached: do you trust this person to act responsibly on AI? A majority said no to every single one. Alex Karp of Palantir finished last at 81% distrust, with Peter Thiel next at 79%. Satya Nadella won, if that's the word for it, at 65%. Nobody in the industry cleared 35% trust, and all nine fit inside sixteen points.

Dario Amodei sits at 76%. He has built Anthropic's entire public identity around being the lab that worries: the 13,000 words of "Machines of Loving Grace," the congressional testimony, the willingness to name the frightening part out loud. Karp runs a company whose business is government surveillance and defence contracting. Five points separate them.

I should be careful with a gap that size, because it sits under twice the margin of error, and "do you trust X" is partly a name-recognition test. Amodei is close to the least famous man on the list, so his 76% might be measuring "billionaire I couldn't pick out of a lineup" rather than any verdict on how Anthropic conducts itself. The obscurity reading can't run the whole distance though. Sam Altman is not obscure, and Futurism puts him at 69%, which starts to look less like a score than a floor: get famous enough for the question to mean anything and you land in the high sixties, whatever you have spent the last two years saying.

The mechanism is probably sitting in another line of the same poll. Forty-five percent expect AI to damage their careers, against 10% who expect it to help. Once someone believes the technology is coming for their job, the distinctions these men draw between themselves stop being interesting. Open weights or closed, safety-first or defence contracts, they are all standing on the same side of that trade. Sixty percent want data centre construction slowed. Nearly 80% call the American economy bad, and 46% now view democratic socialism favourably, which is the reading Henwood was pointing at.

AI itself and the data centres both polled better than the executives, and that is the part the executives should find alarming. It undercuts the standard industry explanation, which is that the public keeps confusing a useful product with the personalities attached to it. Young Americans have separated the two cleanly. They just came down against the personalities. Nine manifestos won't move 69%, and nine more are coming.

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