In China, 87 percent of people trust AI, compared with just 32 percent in the US, according to an Edelman poll.
Published On 19 Nov 202519 Nov 2025
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China’s public is far more trusting of artificial intelligence than their peers in the United States and other Western countries, a survey has found.
In China, 87 percent of people said they trusted AI, compared with 67 percent in Brazil, 32 percent in the US, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, and 39 percent in Germany, the Edelman poll released on Tuesday showed.
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More than seven in 10 Chinese respondents said they expected AI to play a role in solving a range of societal issues, including climate change, mental illness, poverty and polarisation.
Only one-third of Americans said they expected AI to reduce poverty and polarisation, though half predicted a positive impact on climate-related challenges.
While 54 percent of Chinese said they embraced greater use of AI, just 17 percent of Americans answered the same, according to the survey.
Trust was highest among young people, though still much lower in Western countries.
Eighty-eight percent of Chinese aged 18-34 said they had faith in the technology, compared with 40 percent of Americans in that age group.
“For businesses and policymakers, this divergence presents a double challenge,” Edelman Senior Vice President Gray Grossman said in a report accompanying the survey.
“In high-trust markets, the task is to sustain optimism through responsible deployment and straightforward evidence of benefit. In low-trust markets, the task is to rebuild confidence in the institutions behind the technology.”
The survey results come as the US and China are locked in a battle for tech supremacy, with firms in both countries rolling out increasingly sophisticated AI models.
While the US is widely seen as still having an edge in producing the most powerful AI, Chinese firms such as Alibaba and DeepSeek have made major inroads in recent months with “open” language models that offer customers much lower costs.
Last month, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made headlines when he revealed that the short-term rental platform preferred Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” Chesky told Bloomberg in an interview.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the BBC must fight to restore trust after criticism that a Panorama documentary misled viewers by editing a speech by Donald Trump.
She said a review of the broadcaster’s charter would ensure a “genuinely accountable” BBC, defending it as a “national institution”.
BBC director general Tim Davie earlier told staff “we’ve got to fight for our journalism” after the US president’s threat to sue the corporation for $1bn (£760m).
A leaked internal BBC memo said the Panorama film misled viewers by splicing together parts of Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 and made it appear as if he had explicitly encouraged the Capitol Hill riot. BBC chair Samir Shah has apologised.
Davie resigned on Sunday alongside BBC News CEO Deborah Turness after mounting pressure over that memo, which was written by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee.
The memo also accuses the BBC of issues within its Gaza coverage, particularly by BBC Arabic, anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias and one-sided transgender reporting – among other “troubling matters”.
Davie told staff on Tuesday: “We have made some mistakes that have cost us, but we need to fight”, adding that “this narrative will not just be given by our enemies, it’s our narrative”.
He said the BBC went through “difficult times… but it just does good work, and that speaks louder than any newspaper, any weaponisation”.
Later on Tuesday, speaking in the Commons, Nandy warned MPs attacking the broadcaster to “consider just what is at stake”.
She told the Commons: “There is a fundamental difference between raising serious concerns over editorial failings and members of this House launching a sustained attack on the institution itself, because the BBC is not just a broadcaster, it is a national institution that belongs to us all.”
She added that the BBC “has faced criticism from all sides for its coverage of highly contentious and contested issues, and [has been] accused of giving too much airtime to particular parties, and for giving them too little”.
The BBC’s charter expires at the end of 2027 and the once-a-decade process of reviewing it is set to begin shortly, which she said would help it “renew its mission for the modern age”.
Nandy said there was a concern over how long the BBC took to respond to criticisms which undermined trust.
She acknowledged “serious concerns and failings” on the part of the BBC Arabic Service, but urged strong support for the World Service, which she said was “a light on the hill for people in places of darkness”.
BBC figures on the corporation’s editorial guidelines and standards committee will face questions at a hearing in the coming weeks.
Shah and board members Sir Robbie Gibb and Caroline Thomson are expected to attend a session called by the Commons culture, media and sport committee.
Former editorial standards advisers Michael Prescott, the author of the leaked memo, and Caroline Daniel will also be invited to give evidence.
Shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston said there are “too many examples of bias” at the BBC and said the corporation required “institutional change”.
In a post on social media on Tuesday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said that while the BBC as an institution “ought to be treasured”, it has “continually let down licence fee payers”.
Watch: Ros Atkins on… how the BBC is run
Trump threatened to take legal action if the BBC did not make a “full and fair retraction” of the Panorama programme by Friday. The corporation has said it will reply in due course.
In the staff call on Tuesday neither Davie nor the BBC chair mentioned Trump’s legal threat.
Downing Street has said this was a “matter for the BBC”.
“It is clearly not for the government to comment on any ongoing legal matters,” the prime minister’s official spokesperson said.
“Our position is clear, the BBC is independent and it’s for the corporation to respond to questions about their editorial decisions.”
Asked whether there were concerns the issue would affect Sir Keir Starmer’s contacts with Trump, the spokesperson said the two had a “very strong” relationship.
The spokesperson would not be drawn on whether the BBC should apologise directly to the president.
LONDON — Britain’s government rallied to the defense of the BBC on Tuesday after allegations of bias from its critics and the threat of a lawsuit from President Trump over the way the broadcaster edited a speech he made after losing the 2020 presidential election
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the national broadcaster faces “challenges, some of its own making,” but is “by far the most widely used and trusted source of news in the United Kingdom.”
With critics in media and politics demanding an overhaul of the BBC’s funding and governance, Nandy said that “the BBC as an institution is absolutely essential to this country.
“At a time when the lines are being dangerously blurred between facts and opinions, news and polemic, the BBC stands apart,” she said in the House of Commons.
Trump threatens to sue
A lawyer for Trump is demanding a retraction, apology and compensation from the broadcaster over the allegedly defamatory sequence in a documentary broadcast last year.
Fallout from the documentary has already claimed the BBC’s top executive, Tim Davie, and head of news Deborah Turness, who both resigned over what the broadcaster called an “error of judgment.”
The BBC has apologized for misleading editing of a speech Trump delivered on Jan. 6, 2021, before a crowd of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington.
Broadcast days before the November 2024 U.S. election, the documentary “Trump: A Second Chance?” spliced together three quotes from two sections of the speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.” Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
BBC chair Samir Shah said the broadcaster accepted “that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action.”
The BBC has not yet formally responded to the demand from Florida-based Trump attorney Alejandro Brito that it “retract the false, defamatory, disparaging and inflammatory statements,” apologize and “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused” by Friday, or face legal action for $1 billion in damages.
Nigel Huddleston, media spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party, said the BBC should “provide a fulsome apology to the U.S. president” to avoid legal action.
Legal experts say Trump is likely too late to sue the BBC in Britain, because a one-year deadline to file a defamation suit has expired. He could still bring a defamation claim in several U.S. states, and his lawyer cited Florida law in a letter to the BBC, but faces considerable legal hurdles.
An embattled national institution
The publicly funded BBC is a century-old national institution under growing pressure in an era of polarized politics and changing media viewing habits.
Funded through an annual license fee of 174.50 pounds ($230) paid by all households who watch live TV or any BBC content, the broadcaster is frequently a political football, with conservatives seeing a leftist slant in its news output and some liberals accusing it of having a conservative bias.
Governments of both left and right have long been accused of meddling with the broadcaster, which is overseen by a board that includes both BBC nominees and government appointees.
Some defenders of the BBC allege that board members appointed under previous Conservative governments have been undermining the corporation from within.
Pressure on the broadcaster has been growing since the right-leaning Daily Telegraph published parts of a dossier compiled by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines. As well as the Trump edit, Prescott criticized the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.
Near the BBC’s London headquarters, some passersby said the scandal would further erode trust in a broadcaster already under pressure.
Amanda Carey, a semi-retired lawyer, said the editing of the Trump speech is “something that should never have happened.”
“The last few scandals that they’ve had, trust in the BBC is very much waning and a number of people are saying they’re going to refuse to pay the license (fee),” she said.
A growing number of people argue that the license fee is unsustainable in a world where many households watch little or no traditional TV.
Nandy said the government will soon start the once-a-decade process of reviewing the BBC’s governing charter, which expires at the end of 2027. She said the government would ensure the BBC is “sustainably funded (and) commands the public’s trust,” but did not say whether the license fee might be scaled back or scrapped.
Davie, who announced his resignation as BBC director-general on Sunday, acknowledged that “we have made some mistakes that have cost us.”
But, he added: “We’ve got to to fight for our journalism.”
Lawless writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.
Despite its broad adoption, AI raises questions amongst the coding community.
Artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to widespread adoption among software developers, with 90% of developers using the technology in their workflows, up 14% from a year earlier, according to a study by Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team. However, the same study finds a trust gap with the technology.
“While 24% of respondents report a ‘great deal’ (4%) or ‘a lot’ (20%) of trust in AI, 30% trust it ‘a little’ (23%) or ‘not at all’ (7%),” wrote Ryan Salva, senior director, product management at Google, in a DORA blog post. “This indicates that AI outputs are perceived as useful and valuable by many of this year’s survey respondents, despite a lack of complete trust in them.”
Such adoption findings do not come as a surprise to Matt Kropp, managing director and senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group.
“AI is already in the flow of work for many developers and inside the integrated development environment (IDE) for code suggestions, in code search, test generation, documentation, and even basic refactoring,” he says. “That said, adoption is still ‘wide but shallow.’”
Still, more than 80% of the DORA study’s 5,000 respondents also noted that AI has enhanced their productivity, and 59% report a positive impact on code quality.
Global banking giant Citi has seen dramatic productivity gains enabled by the technology in the past few years. According to Citi chair and CEO Jane Fraser, AI-driven automated code reviews have exceeded 1 million in 2025. “This innovation alone saves considerable time and creates around 100,000 hours of weekly capacity as a very meaningful productivity uplift,” she said during the bank’s third-quarter earnings call.
AI has taken much of the toil out of developing and implementing code, but it still has much more potential to address additional tasks. “There’s still headroom in areas like structured refactoring, better test coverage, and smoother migrations. AI is strongest on new code paths,” says Kropp. “It’s less reliable on legacy systems without context. Guardrails—secure patterns, repo rules, and review discipline—are what turn the remaining ‘easy wins’ into real gains.”
A LARGE conservation charity in one of the UK’s most popular holiday spots has gone into liquidation – putting several tourist attractions at risk.
Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust (TCCT) is responsible for more than 1,700 acres of green spaces in and around the Devon seaside towns of Torquay, Paignton and Brixham.
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Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust manages many different sites across the English RivieraCredit: facebook/@TorquayinpicturesThis included the popular Occombe Farm, which has now closedCredit: instagram/@occombefarm
That amounts to 80 per cent of the green space along the English Riviera including 40 miles of footpaths and bridleways.
The trust is also responsible for managing the entire 22-mile stretch of the South West Coast Path (SWCP) – made world famous in the recent Salt Path movie – that runs through the Torbay area.
Now these destinations known as the “crown jewels” of Torbay, are at risk.
One spot, Occombe Farm, which is an all-weather family farm attraction with indoor and outdoor play areas, animals, paddocks and walking trails – will close for good.
The attraction opened nearly 20 years ago, and has been much loved by families since – including my own, as I grew up in the area and frequently visited as a child.
The attraction was the ideal spot for families to escape to, with something for all ages and interests.
Little kids could run around in the play areas, older kids could learn about the farm animals and even get up close to them, and families could gather over lunch in the cafe – it even hosted many events such as Halloween trails and beer festivals.
While Occombe Farm is the only attraction fully closing, the charity was responsible for many other spots and now locals are worried paths won’t be cleared, bins won’t be emptied and sites will become unmaintained.
This is because, Torbay Council (which owns the freehold for most of the land cared for by TCCT) has said that its “hands are completely tied” due to legal obstacles concerning the liquidation.
Essentially, this means that Torbay Council cannot enter and care for the sites TCCT cared for, until they speak to the appointed liquidator.
I used to grow up visiting places managed by Torbay Coast and Countryside TrustCredit: Cyann Fielding
But this worry is part of a bigger fear.
If these sites aren’t cared for or maintained, they could be at risk of losing their prestigious titles.
This includes the UNESCO Global Geopark title, which destinations TCCT cared for helped to gain.
The English Riviera is one of just three UNESCO Global Geoparks in England and 10 in the UK.
TCCT said: “Many areas we manage form part of the English Riviera UNESCO Global Geopark, due to their unique natural heritage and we’ve worked alongside national, regional, and local associations to ensure Torbay’s green spaces receive the recognition and preservation they deserve.
“It is with great sadness that the incredible achievements of our passionate team, including our volunteers, is drawing to a close.
“Our priority now is to support them as we navigate this process.”
Berry Head National Nature Reserve – also run by the trust – is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) has the largest colony of guillemots on the South Coast and other threatened species like the Greater Horseshoe Bat.
This includes a 22-mile stretch of the South West Coast PathCredit: instagram/@countrysidetrust
Berry Head is also home to 400-million-year-old limestone, making it an internationally acclaimed geological site, as well as two well-preserved Napoleonic-era forts.
If all of these elements become uncared for, locals are worried that Berry Head won’t meet the requirements of the titles anymore, and consequently lose them.
Other destinations TCCT cared for include Anstey’s Cove, a small beach popular for kayaking, paddle boarding and snorkelling, and Elberry Cove – often compared to Mediterranean destination due to its crystal clear waters and romantic ruins.
Inland, Cockington Country Park is award-winning parkland that feels more like a hidden fairytale village spanning over 450 acres with pretty ornamental gardens, farmland and woodland – all within walking distance of Torquay seafront.
The park, which dates back to the Domesday Book, also forms part of the UNESCO Global Geopark and has been repeatedly awarded a Green Flag.
The liquidation means that events at this popular destination will be cancelled, such as the annual orchard apple picking.
The biggest jewel in the trust’s crown is the South West Coast Path though, which recently featured in Hollywood movie The Salt Path starring Gillian Anderson.
The trails are managed by TCCT, meaning over the years all the signage, walkways, handrails and so on, have been added by them.
Locals are concerned that the 22-mile stretch could become inaccessible without regular maintenance.
Whilst the future of each site isn’t clear, many have spoken out about the importance of saving English Riviera’s top places to visit.
Councillor David Thomas, leader of Torbay Council, said: “The closure of Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust will have a significant and deeply felt impact on the people who were employed at sites across the Bay.
“In the coming weeks, we will be taking time to understand the full implications of this news and what it means for the future of these important spaces and initiatives.”
MP Steve Darling said in a Facebook post: “This is a huge loss for our natural environment and for the dedicated staff who have worked so hard to protect it.
Locals fear what will happen to many of the sites now they aren’t cared forCredit: instagram/@countrysidetrust
“Despite repeated calls for support, the Conservative administration has failed to help the Trust find a sustainable path.
“As its assets return to council ownership, we must ensure they are not sold off without public input.
One person then commented: “Please fight your hardest for these natural, public and beautiful spaces to be protected and kept in the best interest for the people of Torbay!
“These natural spaces should remain as they are, with additional funding if necessary — selling any single part of it off to foreign investment, developers or anybody other than local charities or Torbay Council would be absolutely devastating to the people of Torbay.”
A Torbay Council spokesperson told Sun Travel: “We understand that the closure of the Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust (TCCT) will have a wide-reaching impact on our communities, and that many residents will have questions and concerns.
“However, at this time, due to the complex process for liquidation, we are unable to provide any further information on the individual spaces or services that are managed or provided by TCCT.
“We await confirmation of the liquidators’ appointment to determine its next steps, recognising how important these green spaces are to our community.
“We would like to reassure residents and visitors that we will continue to work closely with partners and stakeholders to assess the impact of the Trust’s closure.
“This includes considering what it means for our cherished green spaces, as well as the important environmental designations, community initiatives, and long-term stewardship of our natural assets.”
A spokesperson for the South West Coast Path said: “We are working with Torbay Council and SWISCo (a local service provider) to ensure that current works to improve accessibility along the South West Coast Path and King Charles III England Coast Path National Trails are not impacted by the recent news.”
This include Cockington Country Park, which feels more like a fairytale village with quaint cottages and expansive parklandCredit: AlamyThe charity’s liquidation also means an abundance of events have been cancelledCredit: instagram/@occombefarm
