According to an Edelman poll, 87% of people in China trust AI, compared to just 32% in the US.
Published November 19, 2025
Chinese citizens have far more trust in artificial intelligence than the US and other Western countries, a survey has found.
An Edelman poll released Tuesday found that 87% of people in China say they trust AI, compared to 67% in Brazil, 32% in the United States, 36% in the United Kingdom and 39% in Germany.
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More than seven out of 10 Chinese respondents said they expect AI to play a role in solving various social problems such as climate change, mental illness, poverty and polarization.
Only one-third of Americans said they expected AI to reduce poverty and polarization, but half expected it to have a positive impact on climate-related challenges.
According to the survey, 54% of Chinese people said they were open to the use of AI, compared to just 17% of Americans who said the same.
Trust was highest among young people, but remained much lower in Western countries.
88% of Chinese people aged 18 to 34 say they trust this technology, compared to 40% of Americans in the same age group.
“For businesses and policymakers, this disconnect poses a dual challenge,” Gray Grossman, Edelman’s senior vice president, said in a report accompanying the study.
“In high-trust markets, the challenge is to maintain optimism through responsible adoption and direct evidence of benefits; in low-trust markets, the challenge is to rebuild trust in the institutions behind the technology.”
The findings come as the United States and China are locked in a battle for technological supremacy, with companies in both countries deploying increasingly sophisticated AI models.
While the United States is widely seen as still having the upper hand in producing the most powerful AI, Chinese companies such as Alibaba and DeepSeek have made significant inroads in recent months with “open” language models that offer much lower costs to customers.
Last month, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made headlines when he revealed that he prefers Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a short-term rental platform.
“It’s very good. It’s fast and it’s cheap,” Chesky told Bloomberg in an interview.
