Voters of both parties want tighter AI regulation, poll finds

An overwhelming majority of likely voters want powerful AI systems to undergo mandatory formal safety reviews before they are released to the public, according to a new survey about Americans’ views on AI, going further than the existing Trump administration policy of opt-in reviews for new advanced models.

The poll, conducted by Washington, D.C.-based AI Policy Institute (AIPI), a non-partisan research organization, found that Republicans were more enthusiastic about government-led safety testing for AI models than Democrats, though more than half of voters supported such a measure regardless of their political affiliation.

The survey results are the latest sign of Americans’ bipartisan desire for stronger AI regulations in the face of advancing AI capabilities, representing a shift from earlier findings that Republicans were more skeptical than Democrats of government intervention on AI issues.

“We’re currently seeing the government take a very active interest in managing the risks of AI systems and deciding what AI systems are safe enough to release,” said Peter Wildeford, the director of policy at the AI Policy Network, a policy advocacy group affiliated with AIPI. “Americans want to do more on AI safety.”

AIPI asked 1,007 likely voters across the country to choose between a small set of response options for each question. The poll was conducted on June 10 and 11 and required participants to opt in to the project from an online research marketplace.

The AIPI poll found that participants did not seek to ban AI systems if sufficient regulation was also an option. Presented with the choice of banning AI systems or requiring AI companies to implement safety measures for their most advanced systems, two-thirds of survey respondents said they preferred having AI systems with guardrails.

Yet when asked whether they preferred having AI systems with no regulation or banning AI outright, voters instead strongly preferred banning AI entirely.

Government oversight of AI systems has emerged as a critical policy issue over the past year. At the beginning of June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting the cybersecurity capabilities of advanced AI models. The order directed federal agencies to shore up federal cyber defenses and to establish a mechanism to test new AI models for safety concerns.

That mechanism has yet to be formalized or announced, and the order stipulated that any vetting would be voluntary for AI companies. Over the past month, the administration has tussled with Anthropic and OpenAI over releasing their latest models to the public.

On Friday, OpenAI said it was forced to release its latest model, GPT-5.6, to a limited subset of trusted partners (instead of the wider public) because of government requests over safety concerns. The government cleared Anthropic on Friday to give a set of trusted partners access to its most powerful Mythos 5 model.

AIPI’s survey found participants also prioritized regulatory oversight of data centers over complete data-center bans. Forty-seven percent of poll respondents said they would allow data centers if the AI systems being developed had safety requirements and security standards, while 38% said they would ban data centers entirely. The remainder of respondents said they were unsure.

The proliferation of data centers has become a hot-button political issue nationwide, increasingly serving as a proxy for Americans’ overall fears about AI systems. America’s data center boom now faces over 300 bans and moratoriums, according to The Information, a tech news site, while independent researchers recently found that data center opponents have blocked or delayed projects worth nearly $130 billion this year.

In the AIPI survey, the researchers found that over 60% of both Republican and Democratic respondents thought the federal government — not AI companies — should set clear safety standards for AI systems and then evaluate AI companies’ adherence to those rules. The majority of current safety guardrails for AI systems are designed and implemented by AI companies.

Over 80% of respondents — 84% of Democratic and 83% of Republican participants — thought AI companies should not build AI systems smarter than humans until the companies can demonstrate that they can control the systems.

Federal efforts to regulate AI have been stymied in recent months, as advocates of more robust regulation have clashed with the Trump administration’s view that such laws could hamstring America’s AI industry and quash innovation.

Just over two weeks ago, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick directed leading AI company Anthropic to take its two most powerful AI systems offline because of national security concerns. Lutnick, along with other senior White House officials, including National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, worried that bad actors could use the systems to carry out powerful cyberattacks.

The survey comes just days after several federal primary elections turned into a proxy battle over AI regulation. The race to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., in New York’s 12th Congressional District drew over $40 million, most of which came from political groups representing AI issues.

Almost three-quarters of all respondents in the AIPI survey thought AI will become a more important political issue in the future.

The Pew Research Center released a survey this month showing that around two-thirds of Americans said AI is advancing too quickly.

As in AIPI’s new poll, the Pew survey found that Republicans are now more trusting of the government’s ability to regulate AI effectively, a reversal from prior years.

In Pew research from 2024, 70% of voters who identified as Republicans or who leaned toward supporting Republicans said they did not have much confidence in the government’s ability to regulate AI, compared with 54% of Democratic-aligned voters.

In this month’s poll, however, the dynamics had flipped. Seventy-four percent of Democrats said they were not confident in the government’s ability to regulate AI, compared with 61% of Republicans.

“I think people in the White House who have been trying to push a no-rules-whatsoever perspective are out of step with the American people on the results of the AIPI poll,” said Wildeford of the AI Policy Network.

Add NBC News to GoogleJared Perlo

Jared Perlo is a technology reporter focused on AI for NBC News Digital.