(DCNF)—Americans are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI), but they become less comfortable when it makes decisions for them, according to a new survey.
Seventy-two percent of American adults have used at least one AI product, up from 50% from November 2024, according to the National AI Opinion Monitor, a project led by Rutgers University researchers that tracks public opinion on AI. More than a quarter of Americans use AI every day, although a less than one-in-ten would allow it to make final decisions for them without supervision.
More than a majority of Americans want stricter government oversight of AI, although experts believe there is a big difference between wanting regulation and knowing how to regulate AI.
“Americans wanting a human in the loop for major life decisions isn’t all that surprising. In fact, it’s human nature. People naturally are going to want agency over high-stakes choices like hiring, loans, or medical care,” James Czerniawski, the head of emerging technology policy for the Consumer Choice Center, told the DCNF.
“AI agents are intentionally malleable by design, and can be easily modified to deploy in an approval-based architecture, where it does the heavy lifting, data processing and prep work and turns the actual decision making back to the human for the final nod,” Czerniawski added. “If it is used in such a fashion, one could easily see AI agent adoption accelerate.”
The survey found that Americans become far less comfortable having an AI model make the final decision without them.
“People seem to draw the line at letting AI make unsupervised decisions that significantly affect human lives,” Katherine Ognyanova, a professor with the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and a coauthor of the report, said in a statement. “People are somewhat comfortable with a role for AI, just not letting it make the final call.”
Other experts said that the poll showcases that there if often a “trust gap” that precedes technology adoption.
“Early e-commerce had the same problem. Consumers would not put credit cards into websites because the payment infrastructure was not trustworthy. Adoption followed the build-out of the necessary trust infrastructure. This includes Amazon normalizing the “paying online” experience, SSL and secure payments becoming well known ways for consumers to trust sites, and credit-card networks and issuers building anti-fraud technology and policies into the system. Once the risk in the system felt manageable, consumers adopted in droves,” Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy for the International Center for Law & Economics, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a written statement.
“The market cannot broadly adopt them until counterparties and the people deploying them can trust what they will do,” Stout remarked, adding that the “mechanisms that get us over this hump are mostly institutional, not psychological.”
“We adopt AI because it is useful, convenient or expected of us,” Ognyanova said. “At the same time, people are concerned about AI taking over high-stakes tasks or making important decisions without human supervision. Overall, using a tool and trusting it fully are two different things.”
“As those guardrails mature, expect the same adoption curve e-commerce followed,” Stout said.
Most Americans want more government oversight of AI, according to the Rutgers survey.
Fifty-nine percent believe that governments should regulate AI due to its potential risks, compared to 25% who want limited regulation to foster innovation, the survey found.
Consumers often say they want strong regulation “in the abstract,” but the conversation becomes more nuanced when pushed for details, Stout remarked.
“People say regulate AI in a general sense. They also say they want to keep using the tools they love. They want disclosure when AI evaluates them. They want the systems that help them to thrive,” Stout explained. “This is very similar to the gaps we see in privacy surveys and what technologies consumers actually want to use every day. The gap between strict regulation and limited technical understanding is partly an artifact of survey design. A blunt preference question and a fine-grained knowledge quiz measure different things.”
Others believe that a wave of negative press has given Americans a false impression about AI.
“People have been force-fed an image of AI shaped by Hollywood and a relentless wave of hyped-up AI ‘doomerism’ on their feeds rather than what the technology actually is. When even daily users fail a basic quiz on how these tools work, but are simultaneously calling for ‘strict regulation,’ that is a massive red flag from a policy standpoint,” Czerniawski said.
“Demanding strict guardrails around technology you don’t even understand is a recipe for drawing up bad regulations that will ultimately stifle consumer choice, inhibit competition, and run the risk of undermining the country’s status as a global leader in emerging technology to our adversaries like China, whose vision for this technology is inherently anti-American,” he added.
This belief translates to partisan lines.
In late 2024, 56% of Democrats believed AI can act in the public interest, compared with 45% of Republicans. In August 2026, 44% of Democrats expressed confidence in AI, whereas 56% of Republicans said they believed in AI to act in the common good. Overall confidence remains at 46% over the last two years.
“While overall confidence barely moved, the two groups have switched places. Notably, both parties seem to agree on policy preference: 62% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans still want AI strictly regulated,” Ognyanova said.
The survey found that it appears that Americans may not know as much about AI as they think they do.
Fifty-nine percent of Americans said they understand how AI works; however, when researchers quizzed those polled about how AI works, the average score was 48% correct. Daily AI users received a 49% correct score when tested for AI familiarity.
“Use appears to increase confidence considerably faster than it increases knowledge,” Ognyanova remarked.
“People do not need deep technical understanding of a system to form a reasoned view about who should be accountable for its harms. A sound preference about oversight and liability does not require knowing the architecture underneath. And, so an expression of ‘AI should be more regulated’ is probably more like a general vibe for the survey takers, not a really well thought out set of mandates of what ‘strictly regulated’ means in practice,” Stout said.
More than three-quarters of Americans want to know when employers use AI to evaluate their performance.
Researchers polled 5,154 American adults between July 5 and August 1. PureSpectrum, a market research technology company, conducted the surveys online. The report does not disclose the poll’s margin of error.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
