In May and June 2026, the IPIE’s fourth annual expert survey included 470 experts studying the information environment across 71 countries, almost half of whom focused on developing economies. Pessimism has climbed to its highest level yet. This year, 76% of experts expect the information environment in their country of expertise to worsen over the coming year, up from 53% in 2023. For four years running, experts agree on what a healthy information environment needs most: accurate information and a diversity of voices. Most experts, 76%, say people can find diverse viewpoints online, but only 28% think a majority of people in their country trust the main news outlets to report politics accurately. Lack of platform accountability and misinformation are seen as the biggest threats to the information environment, and experts consider generative AI a less urgent threat. For three years in a row, experts expect generative AI to make the information environment worse over the next five years, with AI-generated video their biggest worry and AI-generated text their smallest. Experts expect AI summaries in search engines to speed up how quickly people find what they are looking for, but to cut traffic to news sites and narrow the range of viewpoints they see. Search engines again rank as the technology seen most positively, 80% positive, while views on social media, generative AI, and recommender systems are mixed to negative, 35–45% positive. Research funding remains the most frequent barrier to studying the information environment, 67%, ahead of data access, 60%, and roughly a third of experts report government-related pressures on their work. Behind these overall figures, experts in developing economies and the USA show similar patterns: they rate threats higher, report more government censorship and surveillance, and view the effects of technologies, including AI, similarly. USA experts are nearly twice as likely as experts in all other countries to report government control of funding and pressure to align research with a political agenda as main barriers to studying the information environment. Experts fall into three different groups based on their concerns: about half worry about almost every threat to the information environment, a third worry mainly about platform accountability and misinformation but not AI, and one in ten hardly worry at all.