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AI Anxiety: What Scares Us and How Do We Solve It?

Concern around Artificial Intelligence has only gone up in the United States, with a recent Pew Research study showing 52% of Americans say they are “More concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI. What are Americans so scared of? Are Americans unique in their concern or do other countries show similar sentiment? What can you do if you are worried about AI having a negative effect on your life?

What Really Concerns Us?

You would think by the headline news stories most Americans would be concerned with rogue AI Agents breaking through their digital walls and hacking the government’s computers. Or maybe we should be worried about the break-dancing robots that are kicking our children in the guts? According to data from the Stanford 2026 AI Index Report, a whopping 71% of US Adults believe that the rapid pace of adoption of AI technologies will make their personal data drastically less secure. In order for us to understand why that is, we have to get into the numbers.

There is a clear winner in the main concern of widespread AI use, Data Privacy. America has a reputation as the Wild West of Data Privacy, due to a lack of federal law that governs your right to privacy. In that same Stanford study the United States scored the lowest in the category of Trust in government regulation of AI with a score of 31%. While individual states like California have the CCPA and we have industry-specific laws like HIPAA for health care. There is no industry-specific law that regulates social media platforms, but we do have a few specific carve outs to protect Children, with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Other countries do not have the same mistrust of the system because there are regulations in place, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which protect all data collection everywhere with policies such as “Right to Erasure” and the right to object to your likeness being commercialized without consent. China has the most optimism around AI adoption because their government heavily regulates Technology companies and will issue massive billion dollar fines or in some cases outright shut the company down for violations of consumer privacy. However, they also have powerful government exemptions in place which allow the government to use these same tools however they see fit. The people accept the tradeoff, that they will be protected from bad businesses violating their privacy and they must trust that the State surveillance will not be used for malicious intent.

How Bad Is It Really?

Now that we’ve established why Americans are feeling anxious and what the cause most likely is, are they justified or is this more AI media hype? We are going to have to understand the real world events and consequences of these decisions and the probability that you will be effected. To measure the real consequences of unregulated Data Privacy we need to find out what the bad actors are doing with that data once they get it. Overwhelmingly we are seeing that these tools are being used for Fraud, Phishing, and Extortion.

If you feel like you have been getting more and more spam calls, there is a good chance you are not imagining it. It is estimated that Americans are assaulted with over 2.5 Billion spam and robocalls every MONTH. That’s almost 200 million unwanted calls every single day. Data from YouMail and Truecaller also show there has been a 15 – 20% increase in these types of calls. Scammers have always been around, but the invention of Large Language Models (LLM) have given them a very powerful tool that increases their success rate.

LLMs provide Cyber criminals with:

This is only one, easy to understand, real world use case where people are already feeling the stress of AI creeping into their every day lives. There are numerous others with various degrees of risk and impact. It’s hard to get accurate data down to the level of detail we need to find the source of these scams, but we can take a look at the overall financial impact on consumers. The FTC publishes an annual Data Book and has shown us how rapidly things have gotten out of control. In 2019, the FTC reported only $2.4 Billion in consumer fraud losses. By 2024, they reported that number had grown to $12.5 Billion, a 5x increase in 5 years. And the trend is not stopping, with a whopping 24% increase year-over-year where fraud losses topped $15.86 Billion in 2025.

Even if you wanted to argue that the economy and population growth also increased over time, that adjustment still does not even come close to the exponential growth we are seeing in scammers successfully reaching their goals. Additionally, these are only the consumer reports we know of; it is estimated only about 5% of all financial victims report their crime. This solidifies it, you are more likely than ever to be targeted for a scam, and the scammers are using AI tools to get better at it every day. Is all hope lost?

What Can You Do About It?

If you have gotten this far, congratulations on taking the first step towards defending yourself, Education.

Education

By understanding the techniques bad actors use you have already raised your awareness. Simply remaining calm and using critical thinking instead of having an emotional response makes a huge difference.

Protect Yourself

There are a few things you can do to reduce your chances of becoming a victim:

Sanitize Your Personal Data

Social Media platforms are a source of what Cybersecurity professionals call Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). OSINT is the “Legal collection and analysis of data from publicly available source used to answer questions or gain insight.” This public data is used by Cyber-criminals, Foreign Governments, and Police Enforcement for various reasons, both good and evil. If you are going to use Social Media platforms and you accept the risk there are some steps you can take to participate responsibly.


How Can SodaStack Help?

We can help reduce your risk of having a breach by monitoring your Servers for unusual activity and making sure they are upgraded to avoid common exploits easily found by AI Research tools. We use Secure practices to handle your credentials and keep your email and social media posts off your personal smartphone with a well organized social content pipeline.