KCL poll: third of UK students fear AI job losses will trigger unrest

TL;DR:

• The first wave of a major new KCL tracker on UK attitudes to AI finds 22% of the public — and 34% of university students — think AI job losses will be rapid enough to trigger civil unrest.
• 69% of workers and 64% of employers are worried about the economic impact of AI-driven unemployment; 57% of the public expect widespread job losses, and half think the recovery would be worse than a normal recession.
• The research surveyed 2,000 members of the public, 1,000 university students, 1,000 young people aged 16-29 and 500 employers.

The King’s Institute for AI and the KCL Policy Institute have published the first wave of a long-running tracker on UK attitudes to AI, and the findings paint a picture of widespread economic anxiety. The polling cuts across four cohorts: the general public, university students, young people aged 16-29, and employers — giving a comparative read of who is most worried and why.

University students are simultaneously the heaviest AI users and the most alarmed about its labour-market consequences. 77% use AI at least a few times a month — compared with 46% of workers — and 27% daily or almost daily. They are also the most pessimistic about civil-unrest risk: 34% think AI job losses will be quick enough to trigger unrest, versus 22% of the wider public.

A coherent picture across three sources

Independent coverage of the same survey by The Independent and Think Digital Partners corroborates the broader sentiment data. The Independent reported that 57% of the public expect widespread AI unemployment and 22% fear civil unrest. Think Digital Partners highlighted that nearly six in 10 respondents agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s 2025 prediction that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years — and that half the public think the economic impact would be worse than a normal recession because AI systems improve faster than workers can retrain.

Around two thirds of the public and more than half of employers expect the economic gains from AI to accrue primarily to wealthy investors and large companies, not workers. Only one in five thinks the UK education system is preparing people effectively for an AI-driven economy. Support for policy intervention is high: roughly two thirds back tighter AI regulation even at the cost of slowed innovation, plus government-backed retraining and taxes on companies that replace workers with AI.

Looking forward

The poll lands the same week Standard Chartered announced it would cut 7,800 jobs by 2030 with AI explicitly named as the driver — giving the public anxiety a concrete corporate referent. For UK policymakers, the data tightens the political case for active labour-market intervention rather than passive monitoring: support for retraining programmes, regulation and AI-displacement taxes is now majority among workers, employers and the public. KCL Policy Institute director Bobby Duffy framed the mood as “more fear than excitement, with real concern for what it will do to jobs, particularly at entry levels.” The tracker’s later waves will reveal whether sentiment hardens or softens as AI deployment patterns become more visible.