The Governance Gap: Public Priorities for the AI Economy

The Windfall Trust and Collective Intelligence Project’s February 2026 Global Dialogues Survey (n=1,023, 62 countries) and Anthropic’s 81,000-person interview study, conducted in December 2025, together provide two substantial but methodologically distinct sources of evidence about what people prioritize in relation to the AI economy. This paper uses both datasets as a reference point against which to assess four influential government AI strategies: the European Union AI Act, the US framework as expressed through the US administration’s ‘Winning the Race’ AI Action Plan and associated executive orders, the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, and Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0, treated here as prominent illustrations of dominant governance logics rather than as an exhaustive global survey. The two surveys are methodologically complementary. The Windfall study captures general population demand-side priorities, while the Anthropic study captures the lived experience of active AI users. Read together, they surface a consistent gap between what governance frameworks address and what populations, including those already using AI, say they most need. Across five dimensions: jobs protection, redistribution of gains, safety in the public’s terms, institutional accountability, and meaningful work, government strategy appears materially under-aligned with the priorities surfaced here. The paper argues that this represents not just a policy gap but a legitimacy risk, and considers what a reoriented framework could look like.