Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stood at a podium in Tucson on Friday and tried to sell new graduates on artificial intelligence. The students booed him. Repeatedly.

Schmidt was delivering the commencement address at the University of Arizona, and when his speech turned to AI, the crowd wasn’t having it. According to Business Insider, he acknowledged the anxiety directly: “the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking.” Then he apparently tried to reassure them anyway.

The boos are worth paying attention to. These aren’t Luddites or technophobes. They’re people about to enter a job market where AI is being deployed faster than anyone can measure its effects, and where the legal framework is still being written in real time.

The Trust Problem

The reaction also highlights something that came up in a different context this week: trustworthiness. As TechCrunch reported, trust was a major theme in the final days of the Elon Musk-OpenAI trial, with questions swirling around whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is credible. That’s not an abstract philosophical question. It’s central to the case, and it’s central to how the public is starting to think about AI leadership generally.

Schmidt’s reception suggests the trust deficit isn’t limited to one company or one CEO. When a tech billionaire tells students that AI will make everything better, the students are now skeptical enough to boo. That’s a shift. A few years ago, that speech might have drawn polite applause.

What the Law Can and Can’t Do

Part of what’s driving the skepticism is that there’s no clear legal protection for people whose jobs are displaced or devalued by AI. Copyright law is being tested in courts right now, with authors and artists suing over training data. Employment law hasn’t caught up at all. There’s no statute that says you’re entitled to your job even if a language model can do it cheaper. There’s no benefits system designed for an economy where entire categories of work might vanish in a decade.

The EU has moved faster than the U.S. on this, with the AI Act setting rules for high-risk systems. But even there, the focus is on safety and transparency, not on whether the economic bargain is fair. The law can require disclosure. It can impose liability for harms. It’s much harder for it to ensure that the gains from automation are distributed in a way that doesn’t leave a generation worse off than their parents.

The Privacy Counterpoint

Meanwhile, Apple is betting that privacy can be a differentiator. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the revamped Siri coming in iOS 27 will include auto-deleting chat histories. Users will be able to set conversations to delete after 30 days, one year, or keep them forever.

That’s a direct contrast with most AI chatbots, which default to saving everything unless you specifically opt into incognito mode. TechCrunch confirmed the privacy focus will be central to Apple’s pitch. The company is behind on AI features, and it’s trying to make up ground by emphasizing that it won’t use your data the way others might.

It’s a real distinction, and it matters legally. Data retention creates liability. The longer you keep chat logs, the more you’re exposed to subpoenas, breaches, and regulatory scrutiny under laws like GDPR or California’s CPRA. Auto-deletion limits that exposure for both the user and the company.

But privacy alone doesn’t solve the economic question. You can have a very private AI assistant that still contributes to wage stagnation or job loss. The two issues are related but not identical.

What Happens Next

The students in Tucson were reacting to something real. They’re being told AI is inevitable and transformative, but they’re not being told who writes the rules or who benefits. The legal system is trying to catch up, but it’s reactive by nature. It responds to harms after they happen.

Right now, the most significant legal battles are over intellectual property and whether AI companies can train on copyrighted works without permission. Those cases will shape the industry, but they won’t directly address whether AI makes the economy fairer or more brutal.

The booing at a commencement speech isn’t a legal development. But it’s a signal that the public isn’t waiting for courts to tell them how to feel. Schmidt and others in his position are discovering that “trust us, this will be good for you” isn’t landing anymore. The audience has already moved on to asking harder questions about who owns the technology, who profits from it, and what happens to everyone else.

The law will eventually catch up. It always does. But in the meantime, the gap between what tech leaders promise and what people actually experience is widening, and the skepticism is warranted.