The Potential for Political Backlash Against AI

Artificial intelligence is poised to reconfigure the economy and politics. Although new technologies often produce net economic gains, their costs and benefits are unequally distributed, making them susceptible to politicization. We argue that whether and how AI becomes mobilized for partisan gain will depend on the public’s causal beliefs about the winners and losers of AI. We capture these causal beliefs using a novel survey instrument fielded with 6,056 Americans and Canadians. Through latent class analysis, we show that a significant portion of the public theorizes AI to be a threat—harming consumers and replacing rather than complementing workers’ skills. These causal theories are already aligned with political preferences, predicting support for policies that delay job loss over those that help workers adapt, and polarizing voters along existing partisan lines. We conclude that fissures in the public’s attitudes toward AI already exist and can be easily channeled toward politics.