By Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent, LiveAIWire
More than half of Americans now believe artificial intelligence is likely to push the national unemployment rate up, according to a nationally representative survey of 1,228 likely voters conducted by Data for Progress in February 2026. Fifty-four percent said AI is likely to increase the share of Americans who are unemployed, against just 11 percent who think it will improve employment. That is not a fringe worry anymore. It is close to becoming the majority view of how AI will interact with the American labour market, and the shift has happened quickly enough that most coverage of AI’s economic impact has not caught up with how the public actually feels.
The fear is not evenly distributed, and understanding who is worried, and why, matters more than the topline number. Concern splits sharply along political lines, and it splits again between fear about the economy in general and fear about one’s own job specifically, two things people clearly do not equate.
Why This Fear Has Grown So Fast
The February 2026 Data for Progress survey found that a plurality of voters, 46 percent, now think AI is likely to hurt the American economy overall, up sharply from an even 37 to 36 split between hurt and help just two months earlier in December 2025. That is a meaningfully large swing for a two-month period, and it lines up with a wave of AI-attributed layoff announcements across the technology, finance and customer service sectors in the first quarter of 2026. Separate global research from Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report, surveying nearly 12,000 employees and executives worldwide, found that employee concern about job loss due to AI rose from 28 percent in 2024 to 40 percent in 2026, a 12 percentage point jump in two years.
What This Means for Your Own Job, Not Just the Economy
Here is the distinction that gets lost in most coverage of AI job fear. Worrying that AI will hurt the economy broadly is not the same as worrying that AI will take your specific job, and Americans draw that line clearly. The same Data for Progress survey found that while 54 percent expect AI to raise unemployment nationally, only 37 percent of employed respondents said they were personally very or somewhat concerned about their own job being reduced or displaced by AI. Most employed people, 63 percent, said they were only a little concerned or not concerned at all about their own position. If you are worried about AI and your own job specifically, you are in the minority of workers, even though you are in step with the wider public mood about the economy overall.
The Partisan Divide Nobody Talks About
Fear of AI job displacement is not just a demographic story, it is a political one. Concern about AI hurting the economy has risen fastest among Democrats, climbing from 34 percent in December 2025 to 53 percent in the February 2026 survey. Concern about one’s own job being displaced follows the same partisan pattern: 49 percent of Democrats say they are concerned about their own job, compared with 34 percent of Independents and just 27 percent of Republicans. That gap has been widening rather than narrowing, and it means AI job anxiety in America is increasingly filtered through political identity as much as occupational exposure.
What Employers Are Actually Signalling
The employer side of the picture, while separate from public opinion, helps explain why the fear is rising. Mercer’s global survey found that 63 percent of C-suite executives now identify redesigning work around AI and automation as their highest people-related priority, and 65 percent expect between 11 and 30 percent of their workforce to be redeployed or reskilled due to AI within two years. Crucially, this is being framed by companies as restructuring rather than replacement, but the practical effect on hiring and job security reads similarly enough to workers that public fear is tracking corporate AI strategy fairly closely, even when the language companies use avoids the word layoffs.
Reading the Fear Against the Actual Risk
None of this means the public fear is necessarily proportionate to the actual near-term risk. Employment economists have repeatedly cautioned that AI-attributed layoffs are sometimes used to describe restructuring decisions that would likely have happened anyway, for reasons unrelated to AI capability. What the polling data does establish clearly is that public sentiment has shifted meaningfully in a short period, that the shift is driven partly by real layoff announcements and partly by broader anxiety about AI’s economic direction, and that the gap between fearing AI’s effect on the economy and fearing its effect on one’s own specific job remains wide. Both things can be true: AI job fear can be rising fast, and most people can still feel more secure in their own position than the aggregate numbers suggest.
Our earlier coverage of the broader AI workplace divide found that the split in outcomes runs within occupations as much as between them, a distinction worth keeping in mind when reading any single statistic about jobs at risk. The evidence on what current employment data actually shows about AI displacement points to a similar conclusion, that aggregate fear and individual risk are measuring different things. Understanding where augmentation and outright replacement diverge in practice is the more useful lens for anyone trying to assess their own exposure rather than reacting to the headline percentage alone.
About the Author
Stuart Kerr is Technology Correspondent at LiveAIWire, covering artificial intelligence, emerging technology, and their impact on business, society, and everyday life. LiveAIWire publishes original AI journalism every weekday at liveaiwire.com.