Snap CEO praises AI for writing two-thirds of the company’s code but warns fellow tech executives underestimate ‘societal pushback’ to the tech

Snap, the tech company behind the social media app Snap Chat, introduced on Tuesday AI Sponsored Snaps, an advertising tool that will allow users to chat with AI bots from a brand partnered with the social media platform. It’s one of the many ways the company has continued to lean into AI. But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the pivot toward new technologies won’t necessarily help the company score any popularity points. “I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out,” Spiegel said in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” earlier this week, “And I think we’re going to enter a period of time where there’s going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI.” Spiegel has touted Snap’s own ability to lean hard into AI without alienating usership—the company currently boasts a billion monthly users. The platform launched its chatbot “My AI” in Feb. 2023, just months after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Earlier this month, Spiegel called AI “probably the best thing that’s ever happened” to the company and said AI now writes two-thirds of the company’s code. Snap grew its subscriber count 71% year-over-year in the last quarter of 2025 and now has more than 25 million paid subscribers. Its revenue grew 11% year-over-year in 2025, reaching $5.9 billion. An NBC News poll published in March found that of 1,000 registered voters, only 26% had a positive view of AI, while 46% had a negative view. That makes AI only more popular than the Democratic party, which had a 22-point net negative rating, as well as Iran, which had a 53-point net negative rating. Fear of the technology has even pushed some employees, particularly young people, to undermine their workplace’s AI rollout. A survey of 2,400 knowledge workers from AI agent firm Writer and research firm Workplace Intelligence found 29% of employees—and 44% of Gen Z workers—admitted to sabotaging their employer’s implementation of