What Do Americans Know About Big Tech and AI Companies?

What Do Americans Know About Big Tech and AI Companies?

by R. Michael Alvarez, Ransi Clark, and Alex Halsey, California Institute of Technology

April 27, 2026

Big Tech and AI companies seem to be in the headlines nearly every day – Apple's recent leadership transition and Anthropic's tussle with the Department of Defense have generated big headlines. But beyond the headlines, we wanted to know whether Big Tech and AI companies are generally known by American registered voters.

We conducted a survey last month with YouGov. The survey was in the field March 13-20, 2026, and 2,187 U.S. registered voters from YouGov's online panel took our survey which focused on AI and technology companies, their impact on sustainability, and about AI data centers. The sample was generated by YouGov to be representative of the population of U.S. registered voters, and they provided weights which we use in our analyses in this post.

Early in our survey, each respondent was asked a simple question. They were given a list of ten actual technology and AI companies, and simply asked "Which of the following companies have you heard of?" It is a simple awareness question, primarily used to gauge the extent to which these company names and brands are known to the public. We didn't in this survey have a follow-up question, so we don't really know what might be the reason that a respondent is aware of one of these companies, whether it is the result of use of one of their products, or say hearing about them in the news.

They could then check off whether they had heard of each company, which included: Anthropic, Apple, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, NVIDIA, and XAI. We also included a fictional tech company, called Moros, as an attention check.

In Figure 1 we show the weighted percentages showing the population's awareness of each of the tech and AI firms, as well as our fictional Moros.

Starting with Moros, note that very few of the respondents in our sample fell for the attention check; only 1.8% said that they had heard of this fictional company. That's good news for survey response quality, and a great initial check on the quality of the data from our survey.

We see that what we'll call Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta) are nearly universally known to those in our sample. At least 92% of registered voters in our sample had heard of these Big Tech firms (with Amazon and Google having 96% awareness levels). This is no doubt due to their prominence in the lives of most Americans, and to the deep penetration of their products and services into American society.

But note that the newer entrants into the technology space – the AI companies – have lower levels of awareness in the population. OpenAI, whose flagship product ChatGPT has been widely discussed over the past few years in the news and in public conversations, saw 74% of our sample say they were aware of them. NVIDIA, maker of the GPU chips that power AI, had an overall awareness of just a majority of our sample (54%). Anthropic and DeepSeek had lower levels of awareness (47% and 42%, respectively). Only 15% of our sample was aware of XAI.

Figure 1: Awareness of Tech Companies

Of course, our survey contained questions allowing us to examine how awareness of these tech and AI companies varies across important subgroups of the population of U.S. registered voters. In the Appendix, we give the complete results for the overall awareness levels for four important subgroups: gender, partisanship, age, and educational attainment.

But here we will focus on these results in terms of gaps between different aspects of each subgroup, starting with gender. The gender gaps are shown in Figure 2. The awareness of the five Big Tech companies is quite similar for men and women. But men are generally more likely to be aware of the AI companies, by sometimes wide margins. Men as a group are 25.5 percentage points more aware of NVIDIA than women; and men as a group are about 12 percentage points more aware of DeepSeek, Anthropic, and XAI, than are women. The gender gap in awareness for OpenAI is 8.5 percentage points, again with men as a group more aware of OpenAI than women.

Figure 2: Tech and AI Company Awareness by Gender

We use a similar approach to examine the differences in awareness for partisanship in Figure 3, focusing on the differences between Democrats and Republicans (the complete results for awareness by partisanship are in the Appendix). We do not find major partisan gaps in awareness of the Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta). But for the AI companies, we see some significant partisan gaps. Democrats are generally more aware of all of the AI companies, in particular Anthropic (20 percentage point gap), OpenAI (10 percentage point gap), DeepSeek (8 percentage point gap), and NVIDIA (7 percentage point gap). There is not a substantial partisan gap in our data for XAI.

Figure 3: Tech and AI Company Awareness for Democrats and Republicans

The next demographic we examine is educational attainment, again the complete results are in the Appendix. Here in Figure 4, we focus on the gaps between the lowest and highest levels of educational attainment: those with a high school degree or less, relative to those with a post-graduate degree. Here we see that overall, awareness of all the companies we asked about in our survey is higher among those with a post-graduate degree than with a high school degree or less. The gaps for the Big Tech firms are relatively small in size, ranging from a low of 3.6 percentage points for Apple to 8 percentage points for Meta.

But the awareness gaps between these two groups become larger for the AI companies, with at least double-digit gaps for all five of the AI companies. XAI and DeepSeek show smaller gaps (around 12 percentage points), while the others have larger gaps: OpenAI (20 percentage points), NVIDIA (25 percentage point gap), and Anthropic (26 percentage point gap).

Figure 4: Awareness of Tech and AI Companies by Educational Attainment

Finally, in Figure 5 we show the age gaps in awareness between those 18 to 30, and those 65 or older, in our sample. Again, the full results for all age groups are in the Appendix.

Here we see interesting results. For the Big Tech firms, we generally see that older U.S. registered voters have higher awareness; the age gaps between older and younger registered votes are in the 8 to 14 percentage point range for the Big Tech companies. But for the AI companies, the results flip, with younger registered voters as a group being more aware of AI companies, by sometimes large margins, in particular DeepSeek (29 percentage point gap) and OpenAI (a 13-percentage point gap). We must note, in passing, that there is also a slight gap for Moros, our fictional company, with those 18 to 30 about 3 percentage points more likely to say they are aware of Moros than those 65 or older.

Figure 5: Tech and AI Company Awareness and Age Gaps

There is of course much more in our recent March 2026 survey, and in the coming weeks we will share additional results about the view of American registered voters, in particular about AI in general, and specifically AI data centers. This particular snapshot from our survey data has revealed a number of interesting patterns:

- Generally American registered voters are more aware of Big Tech companies than AI companies.

- There is a notable gender gap in awareness, especially in awareness of AI companies, with men generally stating that they are more aware of AI companies than women.

- There are similar gaps when we look at partisanship (with Democrats as a group more aware of the AI companies than Republicans). And when we looked at the those with post-graduate education relatively to those with a high school degree or less, we see that those with post-graduate education are overall more aware of AI companies.

- There are significant gaps between the older and younger groups in our sample; older registered voters are more aware of Big Tech companies, while younger registered voters are more aware of AI companies as a group.

In future posts we will take deeper dives into these, and other questions, from this interesting survey.