Pew Survey: Half of US Adults Use AI Chatbots, but Only 16% Think AI Is Good for Society

Half of America is using AI, and most of them are cursing it while they do.

Three key facts

49% of US adults now use AI chatbots. The Pew Research Center released its "Americans and AI 2026" report on June 17, based on a survey of 5,119 US adults conducted February 17–23. Nearly half of American adults now use AI chat tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot — up sharply from roughly 33% in the summer of 2024. About one in four use them daily. ChatGPT leads with a 44% usage rate. Younger users are even more active: 58% of adults under 30 have used AI chatbots, and among teens the figure hits 64%.

Only 16% believe AI will have a positive impact on society. That is the most striking number in the report. Around 40% of respondents expect AI to have a negative effect on society over the next 20 years. 71% of Americans think AI will make their personal data less secure; only 3% think it will improve data security. The top use cases are research (42%) and work (38%), but usage has not translated into trust.

"Use it but don't trust it" is now the dominant attitude. The survey paints a contradictory portrait: Americans are adopting AI tools rapidly while remaining deeply pessimistic about their societal consequences. This is fundamentally different from the "afraid because I've never tried it" narrative of a few years ago — now people have tried it, understand it, and still don't believe it will turn out well.

WangDou's Take

A 49% adoption rate paired with a 16% confidence score — hand this dataset to a product manager interview panel and they'd call it too cruel to be a real case study. Two-thirds of your users think your product will damage society. This isn't an "unfamiliar, therefore afraid" problem — people use ChatGPT every day to look things up and draft emails, then turn around and tell the surveyor "AI will make my data less secure." The 71%-worry-versus-3%-optimism gap on data security — a 24x spread — is the number AI companies should actually be losing sleep over. Silicon Valley loves to say "build something useful and trust follows." Pew's report is a clean slap across that assumption: usefulness and trust are separated by an ocean.

Source: Pew Research Center — Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact